John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania is going to become a museum.
A destination for writers and scholars
The Quest to Write In Other Languages
A writer in both Italian and Arabic, Amara Lakhous writes on linguistic “polygamy” and her desire to become a trilingual writer. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s Millions piece on reading the English translation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words.
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A person should not be a dud avacado?
At the helm of The Paris Review's advice column this week, Sasha Frere-Jones describes Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be ? as the inverse of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avacado.
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Spin the Mindwheel
Do you remember the time that Robert Pinsky, translator of classic literature and former Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote a text-based video game? Don't worry, we didn't either.
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The Twin Wins the IMPAC
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced its winner: Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin. The book was previously on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist. See Also: The IMPAC longlist and shortlist.
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“Intellectual Terrorist”
If last year's The Marriage Plot was too brief a taste of semiotics for you, here's an interesting essay on Jacques Derrida, "the Samson to tear down the temple of structuralism," and his seminal 1966 American presentation on "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences."
Library Buys Poet’s 40000 Emails
The British Library has paid £32,000 for poet Wendy Cope's email archive. A far cry from stacks of personal letters, but seemingly the natural progression of things. According to Cope herself, many of the emails "are not interesting at all". (via @BookBench)
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Love Letter to Technology
The last book that Michelle Vider loved was our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. Claire Cameron’s interview with Mandel from The Millions is a nice complement.
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