There are a lot of species of birds.
“The Scopes Monkey Trial of American literary culture”
That dictionary sitting on your bookshelf has a more scandalous past than you might think.
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Ryan Gosling San Serif
Font geeks will get a kick out of this witty Tumblr site that mashes up glam shots of Ryan Gosling with lessons on the proper, and improper, uses of many typographical fonts and symbols.
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Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: “I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character.”
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Where Has the Venom Gone? Pls RT.
Jacob Silverman tackles the niceness epidemic besieging literary criticism at the moment. Where have the hatchet jobs gone? Is social media’s “communalism” robbing critics of their fangs? Each time a publication refuses to print a negative review, the act amounts to “a victory for a publicist, but not for readers,” he writes. (Just a few notes: Silverman’s piece is based on a blog post he wrote recently; Emma Straub has responded on her own blog; and, for what it’s worth, our own Michael Bourne’s recent review of Richard Ford’s Canada was pretty toothy.)
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Koestenbaum on Levé
Humiliation author Wayne Koestenbaum takes a page out of our own Mark O’Connell’s book to review Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait.