Jessica Love explores a little of the science behind every weary reader’s nemesis: zoning out.
Analyzing the Scumbag Brain
Carl Köhler in Toronto
The University of Toronto now has a webpage up for its current exhibition “Beyond the Words: Author Portraits by Carl Köhler.” See some of Köhler’s remarkable portraits of artists and intellectuals and read about him here.
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“A testament to the ‘borderless world'”
Year In Reading contributor Scott Esposito interviewed László Krasznahorkai’s translator Ottilie Mulzet. Among the topics they discuss is Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai’s most recent novel. It will be published this spring.
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You Are What You Buy
This piece by Carrie Murphy is delightful and playful and a couple other “adjective”+fuls all in one.
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Facebook’s Most Popular Titles
We’ve mentioned the “What books have stayed with you?” social media trend before, and now Facebook has tallied up the most popular titles by country. The results are both exactly what you would expect – The Little Prince ranks high in France, One Hundred Years of Solitude fairs well in Latin America – and a little surprising as the Harry Potter series tops the list in countries ranging from India to Italy to Brazil.
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Was the Soviet Union doomed to fail?
Francis Spufford’s fictionalized book Red Plenty looks to the 1950s-1960s “cybernetics” initiative to answer one of the main questions about the USSR: “Could the Soviet project to build communism have succeeded, or was it doomed to failure from the start?” In his review for The Hoover Institution, Marshall Poe contends the latter.
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On Target
We might not get to choose between Peeta and Gale, but we can have Katniss Everdeen’s archery skills. Since The Hunger Games became popular, young girls are picking up bows and arrows more than ever before. Membership at USA Archery has doubled in the past two years, and people are buying recurve bows faster than they can make them. Perhaps they’d also enjoy the Hunger Games day camp we wrote about earlier.
Convention for the Bookish
Miss this year’s AWP? The New Yorker has published a brief write-up of the conference, just to make you jealous.
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