You don’t need to visit Houghton Library in Cambridge, MA to check out Emily Dickinson’s family artifacts. You can catch a glimpse from the comfort of your own home.
Dickinson Family Artifacts
What We Can Learn from Goodnight Moon
Aimee Bender, Year in Reading alum and author of, most recently, The Color Master, writes for The New York Times about the structural genius of Goodnight Moon: “[The story] does two things right away: It sets up a world and then it subverts its own rules even as it follows them.”
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New Zadie Smith Story
Recommended Reading: “Meet The President!” by Zadie Smith. (Yes, that Zadie Smith.)
Balance of Power: Grossman and Beha, Reader and Writer
Lev Grossman‘s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” drew an interesting collection of comments, as well as a considered response from Christopher Beha at n+1.
OED Overload
If you’re eagerly anticipating the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, be prepared to wait until 2034. You can blame the internet for the delay, which has made research easier but also leads to information overload. There are so many new words that the dictionary would be 40 volumes if it ever makes it to print, but expect it to be only online instead. For more on the new OED, read a profile of new editor Michael Proffitt.
Us vs. Them
When The New York Times tried to ask Jhumpa Lahiri what immigrant fiction inspired her, she smacked the question down by saying there is no such thing as immigrant fiction. “If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.”
Virtual Fictitious Reality
“In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being ‘a lonely, anti-social affair’—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)” It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
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