“Is this the right time to say ‘Zounds, milady’?” A short history of Renaissance Faires.
Milord, Milady
New Deborah Eisenberg Story
In a 2010 profile, Deborah Eisenberg told us, of her current efforts at writing fiction, "I’m sort of desperately throwing myself against pieces of paper and only coming up with what look like bug smears." Now, as will shock none of her readers Eisenberg has come up with something considerably more appetizing: a new short story called "Recalculating." It's available, free, at the NYRB (!).
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“Oh, you Irish—you’re such MAR-velous storytellers”
The Testament of Mary author Colm Tóibín was interviewed as part of the President’s Reading Series at Johns Hopkins University, and he spoke about the difference between “being a reader, and being an Irish reader.”
Stop reading this immediately
"Internet reading takes up my time without my setting that time aside for it, and fills me with images and thoughts that I don’t perceive going in, like radiation... In these online minutes or hours, I drift along with my mouth open, absorbing whatever’s floating by, never chewing or even swallowing, just letting it all seep pre-chewed into me": an elegant argument against reading about books before you read the books in question at Electric Literature. (But we hope you'll continue to read The Millions anyway.)
The New Gutenberg
In the latest issue of Harvard magazine, Nathan Heller writes about Arion Press, the last remaining “full-service letterpress in the United States.” Apparently Arion, which has “an in-house foundry where lead is melted into ingots,” sells editions of canonical titles (like Ulysses) that retail for thousands of dollars. (h/t our own Kevin Hartnett)
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Adam Bomb and Friends
Max Axe here. I was seven years old when the Garbage Pail Kids debuted and quickly became all the rage, so news that this Garbage Pail Kids book - with an introduction by creator Art Spiegelman - is hitting bookstores now is transporting me back to my schoolyard days. (Also, how did I not know until now that Spiegelman was behind GPK?)