Slate’s got a video interview with Salman Rushdie in three parts, and his speaking agency has released a rare video from one of Rushdie’s previously unrecorded talks, where the man describes writers as much more vulnerable than ideas.
The Salman Rushdie Channel
The Future Is Now
Today at 3 pm EST, Toni Morrison will be digitally signing copies of her recent novel Home, in celebration of Black History Month. The entire event will be streamed live on Google+.
In Thrall of Print Mathematics
Former nytimes.com design director Khoi Vinh tries to renew his digital subscription to the paper, and it doesn't go well: "The total customer experience here is haphazard at best, and, at worst — I hate to say this because I am still friendly with many people at the company, but in truth there’s no way around it — it’s insulting."
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The Myth of Farmer
In an essay for The Morning News, Matt Evans takes a look at "how an unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of cinema’s most radiant stars, into a lobotomized zombie."
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The Return of the (Poet) King
"Grim was the world and grey last night / The moon and stars were fled." It looks like even J.R.R. Tolkien might have been a an angsty teen. Two previously unseen poems by the legendary author have been found in a forgotten annual printed by a small primary school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1936. For another Tolkien-related blast from the past, here is W.H. Auden's review of The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings series.
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A Is for Apple
"I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees." Apples, plastic bags, teeth In The Guardian, Karl Ove Knausgaard attempts to explain the world to his unborn baby, object by object. Pair with our review of his epic, My Struggle.
Not Sure
Are people losing interest in fiction that “offers more questions than answers?” In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley suggested that modern readers have little taste for uncertainty. At The Rumpus, Rob Roberge asks how much this contributes to popular disinterest in literature.
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