How could anybody believe Henry David Thoreau invented raisin bread? The Walden author once burned down about 300 acres of forest trying to cook fish!
Transcendentalist by Day; Awful Cook by Night
DFW, Edited
The changes between the transcription of David Foster Wallace reading ‘A fragment of a longer thing’ in 2000 and the version of that story ‘Backbone’ as published in the recent New Yorker. (via The Paris Review)
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Looking for a Job? In Space?
Water coolers across the nation were abuzz this week with news of the James Cameron-backed and billionaire-led initiative to begin mining resources from the asteroid belt. It’s the stuff of science fiction, and it may seem hard to believe, but the company’s actually already begun hiring prospective space miners!
Charlotte Brontë’s Voice
While writing about Charlotte Brontë’s voice, Bee Wilson pays special attention to the ways the Jane Eyre author “makes a gothic fairy tale about a plain governess so raw and exhilarating.”
Are Book Blurbs Helpful or Harmful?
Man Booker judge Colin Thubron expressed frustration with gushing book blurbs, which he says “almost blackmail” readers: “you’re either intellectually or morally incompetent if you don’t love this book or you’ve failed if you haven’t understood it.” Our own Bill Morris tackled the age old question—”To Blurb or not Blurb”—a few years ago.
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Monumental Véra of Montreux
Recommended Reading: This fascinating piece on Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, caretaker, and longtime muse, Véra. Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle made our exhaustive list of difficult books a few years back.
Make It New
“After ten years of painting, that is to say ten years of using an abstract, invented language, writing stories was the closest I had come to working in the realm of ‘realism.’ It was the most direct I had ever been in my art. Perhaps the most direct I had ever been. But, as I learned from the comments of my peers in workshop (‘this isn’t a story,’ ‘this is poetry,’ ‘what is this’), my writing was something other than what we referred to as literary realism. By which I mean, the writing many have come to believe most accurately represents life.” Susan Steinberg asks what happened to American experimental writing.
A Mom can be destroyed but not defeated.
It’s time for some afternoon trivia; Hemingway or my mother’s email?
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Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
This essay on the proliferation of gossip in journalism is adapted from Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit. In it, Epstein discusses the problem of “how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism.”
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