Your favorite Downton Abbey stars… off camera!
Isis Looks Great!
What do Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Abu Ghraib have in common?
Picador’s digital marketing team put together a playful web series for Wayne Koestenbaum‘s Humiliation. John Waters has called the book “the funniest, smartest, most heartbreaking yet powerful book I’ve read in a long time.”
Translating the Untranslatable
Five years ago, Jacques Lezra was asked to translate a book of untranslateable words. “The project provided me, and my co-editors,” he writes, “with a vivid sense of the history of how people think, and how societies think differently from one another.” This week, the fruits of their labor were published by Princeton University Press, and to celebrate the occasion, the publisher has released six PDFs of sample entries: begriff, kitsch, media, polis, right, and saudade.
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The Poet’s Voice
“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my husband’s American cousins, who have a five-year-old daughter. She is fascinated and confused by my ‘Briddish’ accent, which she seems to think at points is something I’m putting on. She invented a game where she’ll point at an object in the room and I have to say the word for it—Carpet! Dump truck!—in my best American accent (which is dreadful, by the way). This had her in stitches. When the laughter had died down, she turned to her parents, suddenly contemplative, and said, ‘Isn’t it amazing that Sarah knows a few words in our language?’” Lily Blacksell interviews T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe on how being in the U.S. changes her perception of language, writing in the first-person, and “authenticity.”
Poet Rocker
Paul Muldoon’s band, The Wayside Shrines, is the latest project for Paul Kolderie, the Brooklyn-based producer for Radiohead and Pixies. (via)
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Larceny Lit
Recommended Reading: Sarah Gerard records her phone calls with inmate Matthew Seger as he tries to find time to write in prison. “I feel like all of these ideas I have will someday, maybe, be of some use. I don’t want to let any of them go.” We interview Matthew Parker, the author of the graphic memoir, Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education.
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“It was a nasty autumn morning…”
A thoughtful piece of fiction to mark the November 10 anniversary of Atatürk‘s death.
“Then did he see, at long last, that The Google did load.”
H. Jon Benjamin (of Bob’s Burgers notoriety) loaned his voice-over talents to Vulture and McSweeney’s for this 8-bit adaptation of Mike Lacher’s classic piece, “In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed As a Conquering Hero.”
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