Twelve days after Gustave Flaubert died, a friend cataloged the writer’s personal effects. 48,311 days later, Joanna Neborsky illustrated them.
A Drawn Out Illustration
T. S. Eliot Prize Announced
Sarah Howe’s debut poetry collection, Loop of Jade, has been awarded the T. S. Eliot prize. “Howe’s work – the first debut poetry collection to win the British prize since it was inaugurated in 1993 – triumphed over a particularly strong shortlist, which featured some of poetry’s biggest names, including Don Paterson, Claudia Rankine, Sean O’Brien and Les Murray.” If poetry isn’t for you, try our own Nick Ripatrazone’s ten poems for people who hate poetry.
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Love Letter to Technology
The last book that Michelle Vider loved was our own Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. Claire Cameron’s interview with Mandel from The Millions is a nice complement.
A Proper Sociopath
Last week, I pointed readers to a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch on BBC Radio, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman explains why Cumberbatch is the story’s ideal reader, unpacking his “withering, perfectly enunciated deadpan.”
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Post-post
Recommended Reading: Millions contributor Shaj Mathew on avant-garde fiction.
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Literary Self-Help
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein recommends a couple of self-help books to one reader in this week's mail blog. "Let your self-help freak flag fly!" he writes. Such might put you in esteemed company. As Maria Bustillos pointed out in her poignant investigation for The Awl, David Foster Wallace treasured many self help books.
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R.I.P. Denis Dutton, Founder of A&L Daily
Denis Dutton, founding editor of the esteemed web digest Arts & Letters Daily, passed away today at age 66 after a battle with prostate cancer. We echo the sentiments of Three Quarks Daily that Dutton's site "set the gold standard that we have aspired to match in our own curating of slightly different intellectual content on the web."
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