“Why do readers, those who are bereaved and those with happy families alike, love orphans?”
Guilty As Charged
Poolside Reading
Leanne Shapton spoke with the New York Observer about drawing, writing, friendship, competitive athletes, and her new book Swimming Studies, which has been excerpted by The Paris Review Daily, and, of course, reviewed here on the The Millions.
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Book & Beer
To kick off German Literature Month, Melville House’s marketing manager picked the best beers to drink as you read Heinrich Böll. Now Dogfish Head’s brewmaster Sam Calagione has paired beers with a few other literary classics.
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Turn to Page 394
We lost another great one this week in Alan Rickman. He will be remembered forever by fans of the Harry Potter series as the maybe-evil, maybe-heroic professor Severus Snape, but the Potter series wasn’t Rickman’s only brush with the literary. Here are a few recordings of him reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy.
Springfield, Springfield, It’s a Hell of a Town!
In a big reveal to devout fans like me, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening finally copped to the fictional Springfield’s real-life inspiration: Springfield, Oregon. Of course this matter has been widely pondered before, and was perhaps even answered by Paul Nelson and his cohorts at SNPP.com.
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Keep Hope Alive
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” This seems a better time than most to revisit Rebecca Solnit‘s Hope in the Dark, an excerpt of which ran in The Guardian earlier this year. You can also read our review of Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby here.
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Gatsby Rising
What if the zodiac was based not on your birthday but on your favorite book in high school? If it were, and if your favorite book happened to be Lord of the Flies, we could guess that you are currently “researching masters programs and preparing for your fourth Burning Man.”
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