Melville House has one of the short stories from Tao Lin’s Bed up for your noontime reading pleasure.
“Life was not cake.”
Shellacked Decorative Vegetables
Halloween might be over, but the season of freakishly large decorative gourds lives on. Here’s a fascinating essay from The Toast on how to raise enormous pumpkins–county fair, here we come.
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“Put your right hand on the Kindle and repeat after me.”
The weird and fascinating history of books used in swearing-in ceremonies gets its latest entry: the new Ambassador to Switzerland just took the oath on her personal Kindle.
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Calvino’s Other Invisible Cities
William Weaver, Italo Calvino’s longtime translator, writes about the pair’s “complex relationship,” their “consuming passion for words,” and the Cosmicomics author’s travels through “his invisible cities, cities of ideas, or perhaps ideas masquerading as cities.”
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Wanna Get Away?
Well, this is gorgeous. Nisa Maier curates a collection of photographs and stories meant to “capture the essence of every country on the planet.” The end result, Let’s Travel Somewhere, can take you from India to Cuba, or from Russia to New Zealand.
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Flying Aces
What happens when two magazine writers publish stories on the same topic within a month of each other? We get to read some of the best long-form journalism of the year. Both Esquire’s Chris Jones and The Washingtonian’s Garrett M. Graff wrote about what it was like to be on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination. Jones’ “The Flight From Dallas” hits 7,600 words, but Graff’s “Angel is Airborne” totals 18,000. Save some time to read both because they’re equally gripping and uniquely told narratives.
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Not Enough
“Oh, speaking of dust, I am pretty sure I have a dust allergy. A debilitating, truly severe dust allergy. But I can’t dust this place, because I have to leave everything as it was that fateful day, untouched, preserved, still, because I am crazy and should be on disability. Also, between us, you see this place? It has like 30 rooms. I mean, who can clean that?” Miss Havisham (of Great Expectations) has issues with the denial of her disability claim.
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