Book Club
Prepare for Departure
What’s the best book Mary Roach has read recently? Tim Johnston’s first novel, Descent: “I read the last 30 pages in an airport, 10 feet from the gate, and did not notice the boarding announcements. I missed my flight for literature.” Bonus: Here’s Roach’s interview with The Millions from a couple of years back.
Comma Confessional
“One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.” Mary Norris‘s “Confessions of a Comma Queen,” from the New Yorker.
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Torching Alexandria
“This particular moonshot fell about a hundred-million books short of the moon.” Over at The Atlantic James Somers has the story of what went wrong with Google’s audacious plan to digitize all the world’s books. And like an interesting time capsule, you might want to read Robin Sloan in our own pages from some years back about a very, very cool book scanner.
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New Murakami (Might Be) Coming Soon
That new Haruki Murakami book that’s been selling one million copies per week in Japan? Yeah, the one you’re excited to read? It’s coming out in Spanish in October of this year, so hopefully that means an English translation is in the pipeline as well.
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Dubliners 100
The 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Dubliners occurs this month, and the occasion is being celebrated with the launch of Dubliners 100, a “reimagining and rewriting of the 15 original stories by a range of well-established and promising writers.” Among the modern writers lending their talents to the homage is Paul Murray (Skippy Dies), Donal Ryan (The Spinning Heart), and Pat McCabe (Butcher Boy).
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Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?
The Original of Laura offers a glimpse under the hood of the chromed and gleaming Nabokov machine, writes Sam Anderson of New York Magazine.
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Hitler at Home
Read about Hitler’s vacation homes and how they shaped his image via propaganda in an excerpt from Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos at The New Republic. We reviewed Ben Urwand’s book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, which discusses other propaganda surrounding the Nazi regime.
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