A droll diagram mapping the tumultuous birth of a book.
From Pen to Publishing House
The Good Stuff
"I always think, 'What if I can’t?' Then I always think, 'Oh shit, don’t think that.' Because thinking about it can make it happen. Not like it’s happened that often. But I get scared about it. We all do. Anybody that tells you they don’t they’re full of it. They’re always scared it might happen." There's a lot of really bad writing about sex. This is a piece about some of the good stuff.
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Best Arts and Lit Pieces Contest
3 Quarks Daily is running an Arts & Literature Prize to find the best blog writing in that category. Millions readers, we'd love it if you nominated some of your favorite Millions pieces from the last year for the prize.
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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To Cover or Not To Cover
It seems like we're always directing you to Shakespeare-related literary curiosities, but that's just because there are so many of them! Head over to Electric Literature and watch as some of the Bard's more famous plays get a beautiful new redesign.
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“And I know my rights so you gon’ need a warrant for that”
Just what you’ve always wanted: a “line-by-line analysis of the second verse of '99 Problems' by Jay-Z, from the perspective of a criminal procedure professor!” (PDF)
Gibson Girl
"By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent." Edna Saint Vincent Millay, trendsetter.
The Other Saul
Earlier this month, I wrote about Louis Menand’s recent New Yorker piece about The Life of Saul Bellow, a new biography of the Nobel laureate by Zachary Leader. Now, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan reads the book. Sample quote: “Bellow’s community was his subject and his subject was his voice.”
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