New this week are William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise and Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here. Readers can also now get their hands on the second two volumes in the racy, headline-making Fifty Shades trilogy.
Tuesday New Release Day: Boyd, Swift, Fifty Shades
The 250
You may not have known that Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia - also found time to amass the largest contemporary collection of books in North America. For sixteen years, The Library of Congress has been trying to track down copies of the final 250 listed in Jefferson's collection.
The World Cup of Tabs
You’re probably up to your neck in World Cup coverage, but here are some gems well worth your attention no matter what: Teju Cole created a “Copa do Mundo do Brasil” playlist to set the mood; Pablo Torre’s one-sentence-long summation of Day One in São Paulo; an excerpt from Aleksandar Hemon's The Matters of Life, Death, and More: Writing on Soccer; The New Republic’s round-up of “eleven writers and intellectuals on the World Cup’s most compelling characters"; and, of course, Shaj Mathew's recent Millions review of Brazil’s Dance with the Devil.
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Libraries: Future and Present
"Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information. Asking about the future of libraries is another way of asking where this big, hot mess of information is taking us." Justin Wadland reviews three books on libraries and attempts to predict the future of these institutions in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Meanwhile, Florida Polytechnic University has just opened and its library has no books at all.
The Two Philip Roths
"As time passed, I realized the Philip Roth I’d known before the two documentaries we ended up doing was in the process of transformation. The Roth I’d known for many years was an obsessively committed writer who, in the terrifying limbo between one book and another, could fall victim to a storm of depression or be spent to the point of looking as if his blood had been drained from his veins... This Philip Roth seemed to be discovering new, unexpected pleasures in life, like spending time in bed reading in the morning or inviting friends to his home to share with him the meals prepared each night by his newly hired, young and lovely cook." Livia Manera Sambuy writes about her friendship with Philip Roth for The Believer. Pair with Gabriel Roth's recent guide to "everything you need to know" about the elder Roth's oeuvre.
Nice Wrinkles, Beckett
Portraits of authors composed of their own words? Why not.
Poet Plunder
Poor Robert Frost can't catch a break. Last month, we wrote about the Kansas man who stole a bronze bust of the poet. Now, a Vermont man has been charged with stealing Frost's personal letters and Christmas cards that were left in a desk donated to the non-profit where he worked. He also sold them for $25,000 but only has to pay an $100 fine.
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Maman Called Today
“If to live is to suffer, and surviving is to find meaning in the suffering, does this explain why I have to spend precious time and money at work happy hours?” Existentialism for Millennials.
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Il Maestro
Everyone knows that Joyce grew up in Dublin, but few people know that he spent much of his life in Italy. At Open Letters Monthly, you can read a long piece on his years in the city of Trieste. (You can also try your hand at our quiz.)
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