A new Tumblr, The Composites, takes descriptions of characters from novels and feeds them through police composite sketch software to produce images of their “faces.” Creepy and cool. (via kottke)
Not Just the Mind’s Eye
400 Year of Shakespeare
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, check out 25 author’s reflections on his work. (The tube map has also been recreated in his honor.) You could also read Stefanie Peters’s thoughts on why we continue to rewrite the Bard’s stories.
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On the Ledge
“For years, growing up, I was obsessed with the thought; among my earliest memories is the desire, at age three or four, to run in front of an oncoming bus. Not because I wanted to see what would happen, but because I was sure I knew what would happen: I wouldn’t have to live any longer. I suspect there may be a suicide gene.” Clancy Martin tackles a perennially touchy subject.
Grand Officier Yaşar Bey
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Pirates Write Books Too
Actor Mackenzie Crook (think tall, gangly pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean) tells Telegraph WordUp! Festival that writing his first children’s book, The Windvale Sprites, was the most nerve-wracking test of his career.
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Invitation to a Beheading
“The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.”
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