This week in palaeontology: “…how did 30-ton animals larger than four-story buildings have sex?”
From the Department of Prehistory
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
New York Review of Books Classics is having its annual Summer Sale, and some of the bundles this year are particularly enticing. For instance, you can grab perennial Millions favorite (and current international bestseller) Stoner as part of a bundle that also includes Renata Adler’s Speedboat. The publishers are also offering John Horne Burns’s lost masterpiece, The Gallery, as part of a collection of World War II novels. You may recall David Margolick’s great profile of Burns from the New York Times Magazine last month.
Parting Is Blah Blah Blah
Say goodbye to Sadie Stein! Stein, who is moving on after two years as The Paris Review Daily’s correspondent, had this to say: “It is a strange thing to monetize your emotions. Anyone who writes or creates knows this. And the work one does on the Internet feels insubstantial, even by the flimsy standards of intellectual property. Any body of digital work is a funny mixture of ephemeral and immortal, and it’s hard to know how to feel about such an archive.”
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Why doesn’t more foreign fiction make it to the U.S.?
An interesting piece on why more foreign books don’t make it to U.S. shores. The take away? U.S. publishers generally don’t speak foreign languages and can’t readily assess a book’s quality.
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Snapchats of a Native Son
“That has always been the unsettling irony of the carefree aesthetic. Rhetorically, it denies the full unpredictability of black experiences in America. It is a stereotype, albeit one intended for benevolence and created, perhaps lovingly, by black people.” Doreen St. Félix writes about the roots and ramifications of the “Carefree Black Boy” phenomenon.
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Sendak’s Tales
Check out Maurice Sendak’s illustrations of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales posted on Brain Pickings this April. The illustrations were published with Lore Segal’s translation of the stories in The Juniper Tree: And Other Tales from Grimm. Our own Emily Colette Wilkinson revisits Sendak’s stories as an adult.
Whither Chester A. Arthur?
It’s rare that Warren G. Harding gets much attention these days, which is why it’s all the more interesting that Sadie Stein’s father, when she was growing up, grew fascinated with the single-term president. At the Paris Review Daily, she recounts her family’s visit to Harding’s home.
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World Cup of Literature
Three Percent is organizing a “World Cup of Literature” to coincide with the international soccer tournament’s June 12th beginning. The rules are simple: literature from each of the 32 countries in the actual World Cup will be put into a “32-book knock-out tournament,” and “each ‘match’ will pit two books against one another and will be judged by one of … fifteen illustrious judges.” Who’s your early favorite? (Bonus: “What happened when 10 European poets were asked to portray their home country in verse ahead of the European elections?”)