Well, there goes your Sunday. The London Review of Books has uploaded a whole batch of podcasts to iTunes. And they’re free!
iLRB
Bamboozled
Minstrelsy lives: At Reuters’ Oddly Enough, blackface in Belgium.
●
●
●
●
The Verdict Is In!
Hurry over to the Tournament of Books to see whether Open City or The Sisters Brothers was this year’s big winner!
●
●
Liyuan Library by Li Xiaodong Atelier
A new library has been designed for the small village of Huairou on the outskirts of Beijing. Instead of adding a new building inside the village center, the architects chose a site in the nearby mountains, a pleasant five minute walk from the village center. “In doing so we could provide a setting of clear thoughts when one consciously takes the effort to head for the reading room.”
●
●
“Maybe a mixtape will help.”
Recommended Reading: Rafe Posey’s Rumpus essay, “Coming Out, Again and Again, in 27 Easy Steps.”
The Birth of the Novel
Recommended Reading: On Herman Melville and his reputation for “being sexually dangerous, and even depraved.”
It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus‘s The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.” When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.