If you went to Dublin at one point and paid a visit to The Book of Kells — and if you didn’t, what gives? — you’ll appreciate this take on the artifact in The Irish Times.
That Old Thing?
Shoot First
A hundred years after the First World War began, many people are looking anew at the conflict, among them Thomas Laquer, who wrote a lengthy reflection of its causes in an LRB review of Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers. In The New Yorker, George Packer uses the war as a jumping-off point for an essay on a broader topic: the evolution of war literature in the modern world.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
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Gass Goes Digital
Stephen Schenkenberg paired a previously unpublished 15,000-word essay by William H. Gass with a series of abstract photographs by Michael Eastman, and he’s released the entire package as an interactive iPad e-book.
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The World’s Most Expensive Book
The world’s most expensive book (having previously fetched $8.8 million) is auctioned yet again.
George Plimpton’s Video Falconry
A video game for the weekend: George Plimpton’s Video Falconry. Backstory. via @youngamerican
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Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?