Bibliomania
Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts
LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history's most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances from Charles Baudelaire to John Berryman. (via bb)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Vargas Llosa, Johnson, Hustvedt, Flynn, Cul de Sac
New this week are Mario Vargas Llosa's The Dream of the Celt, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse by Denis Johnson, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and Team Cul de Sac, a book done in tribute to the great comic done by Richard Thompson and to raise money for research into Parkinson's, which Thompson was diagnosed with in 2009.
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Something Whole
"The short story, as a form, has plenty of defenders," the collection of unconnected short stories, maybe not so much. In an essay for LitHub, regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark praises the unlinked stories of Barbara the Slut and Other People and Single, Carefree, Mellow because "despite a lack of the wholeness of a novel, something complete and true and hard-won emerges by the end."
Overhearing the Wisdom
Recommended Listening: Poet Rachel Zucker speaks with John Murillo about duende and the ethics of writing poetry.
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Capital Idea
"The Goldfinch is a grand nineteenth-century novel in that it is an 800-page chronicle of capitalism, a paean to the ways in which the world turns on the questions of who can or can’t pay for what, and how these abilities and inabilities mold us over time. Like the life events and relationships it depicts, it purports to be about love but is actually about money. This portrayal of twentieth century North American society is accurate, but also, just as in life, both exhausting and demoralizing.” On Donna Tartt’s latest novel. (You could also read Adam Dalva’s take on the book.)
Translating Wonderland
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the world’s most translated books. In German alone, there are over 40 different translations. A new project published by Oak Knoll Press devotes three volumes to exploring the challenges of translating Carroll’s wit, puns, and linguistic tricks in 174 languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu.
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#LitBeat: NYC <3’s The Rumpus back!
Last night Colson Whitehead, Sam Lipsyte, Amber Tamblyn, and Andrew McCarthy read to some New Yorkers at Public Assembly, simply because practically everyone likes The Rumpus. Here's Specter Magazine's editor, Mensah Demary, with the latest installment of #LitBeat.
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Blake’s Collected Poems… I was in Exclusive Books in Johannesburg, with the book in my hand, when the lights went out, the music stopped… You can imagine the rest. I was severely punished (by my conscience of course!). It was years before I could read Blake.
That’s freaky. I was going to comment that I stole a collection of Blake’s poems from my school library way back. I still have the book.
Well I have never stolen a thing in my life! But let’s say hypotheticly (sp), there is a place in town where you can take 1 book but you have to give a book. I slipped 2 books in my bag & never gave one. Damage by John Lescroart and Kill Me by Stephen White.
I stole Loitering with Intent (without intent). I happened upon it in a library of which I am a member and said to myself: at last I will read Loitering with Intent! To have borrowed it properly, the only requirement would have been to sign it out. But I must have had an unconscious premonition (or intent) that I would lose it, because I quietly slipped it into my bag, intending a long train journey in a place with few books in English. As far as I know, it’s still on the train, in a seatback flap, traveling 900 miles each way every day on the bullet train.
One night during my study abroad program in Mexico, there was a blackout in school. I was at the library, it was 2am, it was exam week and everyone was dying (trying to formulate a scenario to make my action excusable). I was flipping “Le Corbusier: Moments in the Life”, which has amazing photography by René Burri. It was for an architecture assignment, and the book was too captivating. So we all had to go home when the entire library went pitch black: the security guard chased us out with his torchlight. And then I realised, if the lights are off, the alarm at the library exit must be off too.
I walked home happily. It was cold, but the book was safely tucked under my sweater.
I stole The Moth Diaries from my old local library. I’d borrowed it and kept renewing it and then I moved and I accidentally signed up with a different library (same local library, but different branch with my new address). I had fallen in love with the book. It made me realise what kind of novels I want to write; I’d fallen in love with the Epistolary format and I read it a few times a year, now.
I also accidentally stole a few novels from my ex. when I kicked him out, but not sure that counts as I paid for them.
I borrowed a book on Yeats from my college library in the mid 90’s with a vow to return the “favor” by making some kind of redeeming project from it. But still working on the vow, and still plan to return it afterwards. Maybe I should’ve just let it be.