Craig Brown recommends five published diaries for your reading pleasure.
Dear Diary
Curios
Gerrard Winstanley's 1649 "The True Levellers Standard Advanced." The True Levellers were a radical Protestant sect that founded a commune in Surrey during the English Civil War. In this rather astonishing and neglected declaration, Winstanley argues that God intended the earth to be a common treasury for all and that disparities in property and power between the rich and the poor are unholy and need to be abolished. (Billy Bragg has a song on Back to Basics called "The World Turned Upside Down" that's based on the Diggers' Song, also written by Winstanley.)Bookride documents the surprising desirability of W.G. Sebald books among collectors. "At one point his books were making exceptional sums on Ebay and people wanted ephemera, posters, recordings and anything to do with his legendary walk from Lowestoft to Boulge." The Rings of Saturn is coveted in particular. Only a few hundred copies of the English first edition were printed and they mostly turn up in East Anglia.Many a freelance journalist has pondered the idea of an online marketplace for writing in recent years, one that might ease the inefficiencies and frustration of pitching articles. Attempting to fill that gap is Reporterist, a journalism marketplace. One of the founders offers up details of the project in an interview with the Online Journalism Review.
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Not Literary, But Awesome
Russian scientists claim they'll be able to clone a mammoth "within 5 years."
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All Our Kids
Margaret Atwood wants to edit the Canadian national anthem. The MaddAddam author and Year in Reading alum thinks a phrase in the current lyrics -- “true patriot love in all thy sons’ command” -- needs to be changed to something more gender-neutral.
PEN/Faulkner Fiction Finalists Announced
Five finalists have been named for this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Daniel Alarcón’s At Night We Walk in Circles, Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, (Year in Reading alum) Joan Silber’s Fools, and Valerie Trueblood’s Search Party: Stories of Rescue. One winner will be selected on April 2, 2014, and a celebratory dinner will be held in its honor on May 10. You can read up on all of the finalists over here.
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Betting on the Blind Side
We've been tracking excerpts from Michael Lewis' just-released The Big Short for a while now; the latest, fascinating installment is at Vanity Fair.
JJS to LARB
"Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?" asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. "He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists."