song/book
Dylan Thomas, Rediscovered
A poem by Dylan Thomas, “A Dream of Winter,” has been rediscovered after 70 years. Celyn Jones, who acted as Thomas in Set Fire to the Stars, will perform the poem in London tomorrow. We wrote about the the power of reading poetry aloud and how it connects us to the dead.
Every Love Story Gets a Book Trailer
The book trailer is out for Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace -- it features a brief cameo from yours truly. The book’s opening paragraphs appeared on our site this week, too.
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#workingonmynovelaboutyournovel
Cory Arcangel's Working on My Novel is composed solely of tweets from people who (one is led to assume) are engaged in the singularly tragic enterprise of writing books that, unlike Working on My Novel, will take years to complete, yet won't be published by Penguin or noticed by The Paris Review. Oh, the meta-irony. And now I've just honored it with a Curiosities post.
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The Dan Brown Hype Machine
Amazon has given its entire front page over to a "letter" from CEO Jeff Bezos touting Dan Brown's forthcoming gnostic thriller The Lost Symbol. It's a mix of hyperbole and "thrilling" intrigue. My favorite excerpts: "This is one of the most anticipated publishing events of all time." "The book remains so deeply under wraps that we've agreed to keep our stockpile under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure, with two locks requiring two separate people for entry." Bezos goes on to promise that Amazon will deliver Kindle owners the book "wirelessly while [they] sleep."
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You ninnie-hammer flycatcher!
Short on insult fodder? In that case you’ll want to read Colin Burrow’s review of Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. It includes such notables as: “slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts … slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, [and] codshead loobies.” In the end, “swearing is one of the most basic human acts,” he writes.
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[Video Goes Here]
“We’re seeing a year-on-year decline of text … If I was having a bet I’d say: video, video, video.” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Facebook's European, Middle Eastern, and African regions, believes that the written word is going the way of the dodo.
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I stopped reading almost immediately after the line stating My Antonia is the most boring book assigned to high school English classes. It’s probably one of the ten best American novels ever written. I expect literary ignorance from the culture at large, but when people who supposedly care about books make comments like this it makes me sad.