When you think of Shakespeare’s plays, you probably think of the Globe Theatre. Yet for more than twenty years before the Globe was opened, the Curtain Theatre was the first home to such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. Unfortunately the place was closed and disassembled in the 17th century, and the location was presumed lost. Fast forward 400 years, however, and a team of East London excavators have finally uncovered a few of its sections.
Unearthing the Curtain
The Soviet Ghost
The Virginia Quarterly Review‘s Fall 2011 issue, “The Soviet Ghost“, is now available online. Not to be missed is Ed Ou’s heartbreaking essay and slideshow on how the Soviet government performed nuclear weapons tests on innocent Kazakh citizens. Dimiter Kenarov’s essay on Belarusian tractors is simultaneously a personal journey, an impressive work of history, and a good ol’ fashioned KGB crime story.
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include Keith Richard’s rock memoir Life, reviewed for The Millions by Jim Santel, Michael Caine’s The Elephant to Hollywood, an “unabashedly old-school celebrity memoir” according to its New York Times review, and Stephen Sondheim’s songwriting book Finishing the Hat.
‘Xerox made everybody a publisher.’ – McLuhan
At HTMLGiant, Adam Robinson has compiled an informative review of printers he’s used.
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“Forgiven for Being Human”
“’When I finish reading one of her stories, I always feel understood and somehow forgiven for being human,’ Mr. George said. ‘It may simply come down to wisdom. Like the greats, Edith has it.'” Steve Almond gives an overview of Edith Pearlman‘s writing and publication history for The New York Times Book Review in the wake of the release of her latest collection, Honeydew, which Josh Cook recently reviewed for The Millions.
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Postcards You Wish You Could Send
This week in book-inspired graphics, of the beautiful-but-not-necessarily-informational type: A series of postcards from fictional places.
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Titanic Fixes
Neil deGrasse Tyson just continues to fix the world, one piece of astronomical minutiae at a time. Theatergoers sitting through screenings of Titanic 3-D will no longer see an incorrect star field thanks to a “snarky” email sent by Dr. Tyson to director James Cameron.
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