We’ve all been there, right? Your neighbor lends you a book, you don’t treat it very carefully, she complains, so you thrust a samurai sword inches from her face. It happens.
The Perils of Book Lending
E-Books Get Pricey
As e-book sales increase, their prices have inched upward. But will customers pay $10 to $15 for a digital book? Will you?
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I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
"[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether." A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn't nearly as much of a recluse as we've been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which "transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese."
Jane at 40
The Austen Project, launched last year, asks prominent contemporary writers to reimagine Jane Austen's classics in modern times. (Thus far, we've seen Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility and Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey.) In perhaps the most significant adaptation yet, Curtis Sittenfeld has announced that her Pride and Prejudice will feature a 39-year-old Jane Bennet. After all, Jane (23 in the original novel), is "pretty much teetering on the edge of spinsterhood."
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A New History of the Essay
“You might say we are awash in definitions of the essay and essays themselves, or to mis-paraphrase Wallace Stevens, ideas about the thing as well as the thing itself.” On The Making of the American Essay, the third and final volume of John D’Agata’s A New History of the Essay.
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What He Showed
“Thinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Abbas Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in his films were the things abandoned by Hollywood: conversation, friendship, understanding, compassion, and empathy.” A. S. Hamrah discusses Abbas Kiarostami’s legacy at n+1.
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Real Grit
At the LARB, Anne Trubek quotes Lionel Trilling in a review of The Son and American Rust, the two books published thus far by New Yorker 20 Under 40 alum Phillipp Meyer. “In the American metaphysic,” Trilling wrote in his essay "Reality in America," “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.” Those of you who read our pieces on both books may be able to guess why the quote is relevant.
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