For all you High Fidelity enthusiasts out there: the hidden world of literary record collecting.
Top Five Desert Island Poems
Adam Bomb and Friends
Max Axe here. I was seven years old when the Garbage Pail Kids debuted and quickly became all the rage, so news that this Garbage Pail Kids book – with an introduction by creator Art Spiegelman – is hitting bookstores now is transporting me back to my schoolyard days. (Also, how did I not know until now that Spiegelman was behind GPK?)
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Literature’s Favorite Houseguests
Jessica Francis Kane lists some of her favorite houseguests in literature, including King Lear, Jane Bennet, and more.
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Old Writers, New Media
Which convergence between classic author and modern technology is more off-putting: the University of Virginia’s William Faulkner recordings, or this YouTube video of Leo Tolstoy sawing wood?
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“Happiness was born a twin.”
Robert and Richard Kalich are identical twins, and their family had the misfortune of having them both grow up to be writers.
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Against the Centenary
Every year, we celebrate the centenary of another important work of literature or historical event. In Arcade, Harris Feinsod argues that we should reevaluate our centennial celebrations.
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Wrecked Modern Romance
“[Virginie] Despentes has become a kind of cult hero, a patron saint to invisible women: the monstrous and marginalized, the sodden, weary and wildly unemployable, the kind of woman who can scarcely be propped up let alone persuaded to lean in.” On Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie and French feminist pulp that pulls no punches.
The Most Boring Man in the World
“With thirteen other diners, the two professors of English first prepared and then made their way through eight courses, including beef broth, haddock, steak, mutton, chicken, and chocolate profiteroles….The dinner was a recreation of one eaten 132 years earlier, in one of England’s grandest country houses. Among the guests at this first dinner was George Scharf, founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a man not especially famous in his own day and virtually unknown in ours.” Love Among the Archives brings us into the world of George Scharf, a bachelor affectionately deemed “The Most Boring Man in the World.”
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