If you’re like me, you thought three quick thoughts when you heard about the Chelyabinsk meteor: 1) I hope everybody is okay; 2) I hope The Possessed author Elif Batuman finds time to write about this; and 3) Thank goodness for Russian dashboard cameras.
“The meteor brought them into the mainstream”
A Terrible Beauty
One night in 1937, Avies Platt decided to attend a meeting of the Sex Education Society, held at London’s Grafton Galleries. When the meeting was over, she ended up driving none other than W.B. Yeats to the afterparty. In the LRB, she recalls her encounter with greatness.
Border Borrowing
The Haskell Free Library straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Enter the library in the United States, and browse through the books in Canada.
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Reading for the Worse
Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss the ways reading can affect your life for the worse, with potential results ranging from murder to being bad at sports.
The Writer’s Bedroom
We recently ran a piece called “Where We Write,” in which our staff writers posted photographs of their work spaces. Apartment Therapy has taken it a step further and revealed where some famous and not-so-well-known writers slept. Turns out a bedroom, like a work space, speaks volumes about a writer. But one question remains: What the hell is Patti Smith doing on William S. Burroughs’s bed?
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New Katherine Mansfield Story Found
While thumbing through the archives at King’s College, a graduate student uncovered four previously unknown stories by Katherine Mansfield.
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