New this week: Salman Rushdie’s much talked about memoir Joseph Anton, T.C. Boyle’s San Miguel, The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore, and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting prequel Skagboys. Also new this week: Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach, Sylvie Simmons’s biography I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, and n+1 vet Marco Roth’s memoir The Scientists.
Tuesday New Release Day: Rushdie, Boyle, Moore, Welsh, Elie, Simmons, Roth
Picture Books
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released almost 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collections. Among them are thousands of illustrations from bygone days when “picture books” were not for children alone. Pair with Buzz Poole‘s reviews of contemporary works of visual literature in The Millions archives, from hand-drawn self-help quotes to politically-charged images of transit in Tehran.
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Oh, you were the best of all my days.
Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s “Animals,” by way of the Chicago based ad and design agency, Coudal Partners, and their voice mail based poetry project, Verse by Voice.
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Howard Jacobson on Table Tennis
Tablet Magazine publishes Booker prize winner (and one-time ranked junior table tennis player) Howard Jacobson’s essay on flamboyant ping-pong champ Marty Reisman for the first time in the U.S.
Recession, Eh? Not Up Here
The oil boom occurring in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada’s Bakken Formation is so frantic right now that ND’s unemployment rate is only 3.4%, the lowest in the nation. “Hiring is so frantic,” writes Business Week‘s Bryan Gruley, “the McDonald’s in Dickinson [North Dakota] is offering $300 signing bonuses.”
i c wut u did thier
In an interview with the CBC, Anne Trubek makes the argument for the wide acceptance of poor spelling. Trubek also had an essay in Wired earlier this year on spelling and autocorrect.
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Rediscoveries
It’s been forty years since a burst of new critical attention gave Anthony Trollope a new life. What is it about him that makes his work enduringly relevant? In the latest New Yorker, Adam Gopnik argues that the author was a master of gossip. You could also read Sara Henary on the author’s two hundredth birthday.
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