“Romatic realist” painter Bo Bartlett, born in Columbus, Georgia, is renowned for his epic tableaus depicting a “Hopper-like sense of longing and mystery combined with a Lynchian-cocktail of menace, beauty, and stranger-than-fiction reality.” He was also a protégé and life-long friend of Andrew Wyeth. In Oxford American‘s most recent SoLost installment, the crew checks out Bartlett’s surprising and endearing winter workspace.
Bo Bartlett’s Winter Digs
The Importance of Being Feminist
Liked watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk last year? Then consider picking up a copy of We Should All Be Feminists. The longform essay, now published as an ebook original, was adapted from topics Adichie touched upon in her speech, among them the importance of being a feminist in the twenty-first century. You could also look back on Adichie’s Year in Reading piece.
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Gwendolyn Brooks’s Archives Headed to Urbana-Champaign
The literary archives of Gwendolyn Brooks – the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize – are headed to the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The haul amounts to more than “150 boxes stuffed with manuscripts, drafts, revisions, correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, homemade chapbooks in which Brooks neatly handwrote her earliest (unpublished) poems, and heavy bronze awards ensconced in velvet-lined boxes collected later in her career.”
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Jason Epstein on Charlie Rose
Jason Epstein, editor of literary and culinary greats (Norman Mailer, Alice Waters), co-founder of the NYRB, and life-long food lover talks with Charlie Rose about his latest book, Eating: A Memoir, and the past and future of book publishing.
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Look Who’s Talking Knau
"I could not do anything but wiggle, so I wiggled." Here's a fake excerpt from the non-existent seventh book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, helpfully titled Look Who's Talking Knau.
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The Modern Bretteurs
A Russian man was shot last week over an argument about 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Perhaps this means I need to update my article about the history of the Russian duel.
The Sot-Weed Movie
Steven Soderbergh is interested in bringing The Sot-Weed Factor – John Barth’s “750-plus-page satire of picaresque novels” – to the big, silver or computer screen. You should start getting excited about this if you’re from Maryland, interested in literature, or tickled by the word “beshit.”