It’s rare that you find someone as eclectic as William Boyd. Not only did the British writer’s new play (based on two of Chekhov’s short stories) debut in London this week, his upcoming novel will star none other than James Bond. (If you’re wondering, his friend Daniel Craig is not how he pictures the superspy.)
Moonlighting as Ian Fleming
Wilson!
A rare example of a sporting good/movie memorabilia crossover. I want one (as a friend)
The Giant of Myth
The late David Rakoff was a longtime Salon contributor, and to celebrate his memory, the site published an excerpt of his rhyming novel, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, which came out today.
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Shoot First
A hundred years after the First World War began, many people are looking anew at the conflict, among them Thomas Laquer, who wrote a lengthy reflection of its causes in an LRB review of Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers. In The New Yorker, George Packer uses the war as a jumping-off point for an essay on a broader topic: the evolution of war literature in the modern world.
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Decolonizing the Card Catalog
A Howard University librarian named Dorothy Porter made it her mission to collect and preserve works related to the global black experience.
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Triple Threat
It’s either ironic or perfectly apropos that on the day the royal baby was born, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie teamed up for a rare joint reading.
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“I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome.”
Nonfiction writing might work wonders for history books, but the heart of the genre is still the essay. In a piece for The Morning News Martin Connelly discusses his youthful resolution to be an essayist, which he quickly forgot and then gradually remembered. There are also ironic license plates, convicts and a baby, just to jazz everything up a little bit.
A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.