Introducing/A New Feature

University Of Chicago Press has come out with a new edition of a somewhat forgotten classic in the campus novel genre. Randall Jarrell was a National Book Award-winning poet who wrote only one novel, Pictures from an Institution, about the fictional Benton College. The Kenyon Review published the opening of the novel in its Winter 1953 issue. It begins: “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other.”

It’s the end of July, and you know that means: we’re smack dab in the middle of reading-about-baseball season. Herewith, a selection of great baseball books, courtesy of Sports Illustrated.

After last week’s NYT  “Room for Debate” feature, ostensibly in answer to the question of why so many adults read YA fiction, Roger Sutton at the Horn Book took umbrage at the panelists’ only partial engagement with the question. In the end though, he makes his own position clear: “I don’t worry about adults reading YA novels. Read what you want.”

In 1925 Nabokov delivered a colorful talk on boxing to a circle of Russian émigrés living in Berlin. Yesterday, that pugnacious passage was published for the first time in English.

Haruo Shirane writes for Public Books about writing and publishing in the age of English. As he explains it, “For those living in the Anglosphere, no barrier seems to stand between their world and the many other worlds that now appear at the push of a button. But for those outside that world, particularly in non-European countries, the literary and linguistic consequences of globalization in the age of English can often be severe.”

Short stories will now be available in vending machines — i.e., the future of literature.