“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’ Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez.” The meaning of book shelves.
Shelf Life
Recommended Reading: “Seven Days After Father”
Essay Liu‘s essay “Seven Days After Father” has been translated by Kevin T. S. Tang for Blunderbuss Magazine and presents a daughter’s sincere grief confused by custom. “‘The funeral director forbids tears as we approach your coffin, but demands that we weep on our return. This is the movie script we’ve been handed, one we’ll be beholden to for days, and I know that many things are not mine to decide anymore. Even our tears have been planned for us.”
Translations of Loneliness
“In Rilke’s essay on Auguste Rodin, written in the same year, he describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals. And later on, in Rodin’s studio on the Rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique tiger that Rodin treasured: ‘There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand…. If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.’” Henri Cole on the poet and a place that inspired his work.
The Intellectuals
A look at the writer Nelson Algren, a.k.a. Lewis Brogan in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.
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Meg Wolitzer Goes Hollywood (Again)
Meg Wolitzer details the odd experience of seeing her characters brought to life on the screen in The New York Times.
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Smiles to tears
Writers of facial stage direction, beware: it is not actually the epitome of irony that smiling and crying can seem so oddly similar. At Aeon, Princeton professor Michael Graziono argues that the seemingly opposite gestures may just share evolutionary origins. (Pair with: Darwinist theories about “the evolution of the novel.”)
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Zuccotti Park: Day 10
An n+1 writer revisits Zuccotti Park to find Michael Moore reporting for MSNBC on the tenth day of the protest against financial inequity.
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Walking with David Mitchell
The new David Mitchell novel, The Bone Clocks, ends in rural Ireland, which explains why Kathryn Schulz chose to interview Mitchell on a walk through the Irish countryside. At Vulture, she talks with Mitchell about supercontinents, writing in childhood and the global scope of his work. You could also read the story Mitchell recently wrote on Twitter.
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