Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson teamed up on a series of short films to advertise Prada’s newest perfume Candy L’Eau. Click for the Andersonian single-camera sweep shots; stay for the intriguing French love triangle.
Chasing Candy
52 Blue
Recommended reading: Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (which we covered here and here), writes again, this time about 52 Blue, "the loneliest whale in the world." The full work is available at Atavist for $3.99, but an excerpt is available at Slate.
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The Latest in Obama Lit
Obama inclined readers looking for a swifter read than The Bridge should pick up the pithy new anthology of poems composed during President Obama's first hundred days in office, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days.
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Not Exactly Rotten
According to a recent survey, Danes are the happiest people in the world. This came as a surprise, writes Mathilde Walter Clark, to most of her fellow Scandinavians, who know very well the unhappier elements of their daily lives. The problem, she suggests, is that words like “happiness,” “ambition” and “contentment” have subtly different meanings in different languages -- in other words, happiness in Denmark isn’t the same thing as happiness in America. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel’s review of the Danish writer Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale.
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Git Yer Free E-Books Here
Free e-book bibliophiles rejoice, you now have yet another place to download public domain e-books. The Digital Reader reports on Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-based project to "produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks." Pair with our post from a decade back about Project Gutenberg's pubbing of "2 B R 0 2 B," a "lost" story by Kurt Vonnegut.
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Sunday Simic
The PEN Blog has a present for everybody: four poems by Charles Simic.
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Letters to Véra
David Lipsky writes for Harper’s about Letters to Véra, which collects Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to his wife of fifty-two years. As he puts it, “Companion, agent, live-in editor, bodyguard, and the dedicatee of almost all her husband’s books, Véra Nabokov, née Slonim, has reached a strange elevation in our cultural sky.”
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Quick Links
What happens when you co-write a book with someone who's illiterate? YPTR has the details.LitLinks, a well stocked collection of links about a few hundred notable authors.iPoems arrives promising a plethora of downloadable poetry so you can jam to some verse on your iPod.
Consider the Chapter
"What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?" Nicholas Dames answers with an essay in The New Yorker.