Town of Runners is a new documentary about running coach Sentayehu Eshetu, the mastermind responsible for one rural Ethiopian town’s eight Olympic runners. New Yorkers can catch screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.
Who Runs The World? Bekojians!
Black Independent Bookstores Are Increasing
Here’s something to cheer us up (aside from the good weather this weekend). Publisher’s Weekly interviews a few Black bookstore owners on how Black indie bookstores have bounced back from a steep decline several years ago. If a bookstore in your city is mentioned, be sure and visit.
Dead Ends
Recommended Reading: Enrique Vila-Matas on rock ‘n’ roll, anti-artists, and the central motor of his work.
Rear Window Through One Window
Jeff Desom created a stunning time-lapse composite of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rear Window in which you can see the events unfold chronologically from a single vantage point. More details on how Desom did it can be found on his website.
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The One-Sitting Novel
Looking to start (and finish!) a novel in a day? Electric Literature has 17 short novel recommendations, including work from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shirley Jackson and Marilynne Robinson.
A Visual Mind
To get a full sense of the legacy of William Blake, you need to see his paintings alongside his famous poems. The Wordsworth contemporary did much of his best work — including the covers of his own collections — with a brush. At the New York Review of Books blog, Jenny Uglow pays a visit to a new exhibition at Oxford.
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The sublime everyday
Tom Perotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers, talks about how he learned to write about ordinary life from Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. “The tragedy is that, while we’re alive, we don’t view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don’t—we can’t—value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they’ll one day be gone forever.”