Ray Bradbury, author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, has passed away at the age of 91, reports io9. I’ll always remember the first time I read The Veldt (PDF), and being scared out of my adolescent mind.
Ray Bradbury Passes Away
Cleaved in Two
“As I let the shotgun drop the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me…” This excerpt from Homero Airdjis’s upcoming The Child Poet, is fraught with elements of tension and discovery. Something of a künstlerroman, the book tracks Airdjis’s artistic and poetic development from his boyhood through the present day.
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Striking New Book Covers
The cover art for some highly anticipated forthcoming novels has been unveiled. Both C by Tom McCarthy and Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis are sporting eye-catching designs.
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The Secret Life of Books
“They might underline a page number, draw a little star on the last page, or write their first initial somewhere in the book.” A librarian in Scotland discovered a secret code used by elderly patrons to track which books they already read. From our archives: an essay on the importance of libraries and how they can stay relevant.
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a Library
Summer Brennan attempts the Marie Kondo approach to organizing her library and learns about the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
Amazon’s Programming
Look out, network television. Amazon’s hiring creative executives to shepherd “crowd-sourced scripts” through development.
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Goodbye to All That
After fourteen years, Bookslut is closing its doors. In a post that went up on March 9th, founder Jessa Crispin announced that the blog she started when she was twenty-three, which made a name for itself as one of the first major book sites on the web, is ceasing publication as of tomorrow, May 6th. She talks with Boris Kachka at Vulture about why it’s closing, what she’s learned about the publishing world, and what it was like when she started: “People who started blogging even a year after us didn’t have the same response because the audience got divided.”
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
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THE VELDT got me too. And “Fahrenheit 451” is my shorthand for all the literary scariness these days.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” makes me even sadder now…
As he was for many people, Bradbury was one of the most important literary bridges from kid’s lit to adult fiction for me. (And I suppose Rachel Bloom put a new spin on Bradbury as “adult” fiction with her song.) It was an easy journey from things like “R is for Rocket” and “S is for Space” to “The Martian Chronicles” and then to more challenging work. For me, the book that kept me up at night was “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and who can forget his terrific treatment of bullying, “All Summer in a Day,” which yesterday’s transit of Venus made me think of. And I agree with Evelyn Walsh: “Fahrenheit 451” is a eerie echo of so many aspects of our culture . . . written sixty years ago.