Here’s a lovely little documentary collecting interviews with various people of the book. Stephen Fowler, of The Moneky’s Paw antiquarian book shop, makes an appearance, though his remarks seem slightly less macabre in HD than those he gave to Kyo Maclear back in March. Joanne Saul, proprietor of Type Books (you know it from that stop motion video that lit up the bookternet a while back) also makes an appearance.
The Future of Print
The Young Girl Grows Old
In honor of Lolita’s 60th anniversary, Alexandra Kleeman, Josephine Livingstone, Anna Wiener, and seven other writers reread Nabokov’s magnum opus. Pair with this Millions essay about designing the book cover.
Reading Through Trauma
“My whole life, I had used stories, both my own and other people’s, to check out of grocery store lines and long bus trips, stints in doctors’ waiting rooms, heartache, my own depression, and finally of the tedious exhaustion of new motherhood. Now, here I was in this 15-by-20 room, where monitors and alarms were constantly beeping, and there was no way out, except the unimaginable.” Alyson Foster, author of Heart Attack Watch, writes about her son’s illness and her love of reading.
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The Academic Life
Whether or not you believe that Oxford University Press is “the largest, most diverse and most respected university press in the world,” you’ll appreciate this review of a new history of the company, which goes through OUP's origins, its relationship with its namesake and the opening of its New York office in 1896.
Pen Pals Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Janet Maslin at the New York Times reviews the collection Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters: “‘Hasn’t it been awful?’ Kerouac would write to Ginsberg in 1959. ‘We were so swingy? And now young poets are sneering at us?’”
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This Post Reads Like Mad Libs.
Roz Chast, whose cartoons have been mainstays in the New Yorker for quite some time, has teamed up with Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields to write a book about the 101 two-letter words allowed in Scrabble.
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