Say the books in your Encyclopedia Britannica are moldy, unread and obsolete. You know you could burn them or throw them away, but somehow, you can’t do either. Why not?
Fahrenheit 32
Some (Possibly Stale) Links
William T. Vollmann has a new book out, Riding Toward Everywhere about riding freight trains. In what must be a first for Vollmann, the Washington Post describes the book as a "modest little volume."The New Yorker held a contest to reinterpret Eustace Tilley, its "iconic dandy." The entries are posted on Flickr.The anxiety brought on by selling books to the used bookstore.The Atlantic website goes free. Everything back to 1995 is available.n+1 interviews a hedge fund manager. It's surprisingly fascinating (if you skim the technical stuff).Also in the world of big money, a record was broken on Monday. As global markets plummeted, French bank Societe Generale was selling frantically. The bank had just discovered that an employee had fraudulently lost $7.2 billion, believed to be the most ever by a "rogue trader."
Confessional Criticism
“Contemporary criticism is positively crowded with first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography. Critics don’t simply wrestle with their assigned cultural object; they wrestle with themselves, as well. Recent examples suggest a spectrum, from reviews that harmlessly kick off with a personal anecdote, to hybrid pieces that blend literary criticism and longform memoir.” On why critics get personal in their essays.
The Verdict
Max's verdict in the opening round of The Morning News Tournament of Books has been posted. Which book did he pick, Gate at the Stairs or The Book of Night Women? Hop over to TMN to find out. And don't miss the match commentary, which has some great additional discussion of both books.
New Sebald Excerpt
Over at Page-Turner, you can check out an excerpt from W.G. Sebald’s A Place In the Country, which we previewed briefly in our Great 2014 Book Preview last month.
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Bright Star
Keats on film! See the trailer for Jane Campion's Bright Star.
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Como?
Here at The Millions, we tend to focus on translation as a literary form, which often leads to debates over how much a translator can change the meaning of a text. However, the majority of translation in the world is far more functional, as it is in the case of basic European bureaucracy. In The Nation, Benjamin Paloff takes a broader look at movements from one language to another. Pair with: Barclay Bram Shoemaker on translating Mo Yan’s Frog.
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