Nearing the end of your epic NaNoWriMo novel? The good folks at Electric Literature found some music to aid your concentration.
Brain Food
Literary Threads
Literary-minded t-shirt purveyor Kafkacotton has a new t-shirt out. This one is a clever nod to Kerouac’s On the Road.
The One I Love
Recommended Reading: Sarah Sansolo on her childhood obsession with Britney Spears.
Sacred Literature
“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
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Appearing Elsewhere
I wrote an essay for The Dublin Review on the strange phenomenon of Internet unboxing videos, in which people remove new purchases from their packaging and talk us through the process in exhaustive detail. You can read the whole thing online here.
War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he’d never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers’. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Byron-ness
Which Lord Byron is the most Byron-y? Let Mallory Ortberg tell you in her rankings of Byron portraits.
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