David Graeber’s Debt (which was just reviewed in the New York Review of Books) is available at a 40% discount all weekend long.
Buy Debt Without Going Into Debt
Poets Ride Free
One Siberian city is offering free subway rides to passengers who can recite “at least two verses from any poem by Alexander Pushkin.” The obvious corollary would be NJ Transit providing free service to passengers capable of singing “Born to Run” in its entirety.
Missing Letters
Nick Stockton wonders why writers are such bad proofreaders of their own work. He argues that it is hard to catch typos because our brains arrive at meaning faster by taking shortcuts. Also enjoy this skit of Strunk & White in conversation with the grammar police.
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Burrito Lit Vol. 2
Attention literature-lovers and burrito-consumers: Chipotle has announced the second batch of writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, and Neil Gaiman, for its Cultivating Thought series, which places short pieces of writing on soda cups and paper bags (we covered the first series here).
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Pre-Revolutionary Russia… In Living Color
Tsar Nicholas II commissioned Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky to document pre-revolutionary Russia. His color photographs taken between 1904 and 1916 are incredible.
Assemble
“From this bleak backdrop unspools West Of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan’s sparkling and frequently delightful fictionalized take on those years. It’s a setting that’s near impossible for culture buffs to resist; for a certain subset of nerd, this is a sort of literary Avengers, collecting Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker alongside O’Nan’s delicate and sensitive portrayals of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, to say nothing of Humphrey Bogart and a cameo by Katharine Hepburn, eating soup.”
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Miss Masterpiece
“The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan.” On Miss Lonelyhearts, the darkest American masterpiece.
Put a Bird on It
Jonathan Franzen spent the first half of his life thinking about literature, now he plans to devote the other half to birds. It looks like Freedom is becoming reality as he puts on his bird-watching binoculars again to discuss the “appalling” songbird hunting in the Mediterranean for National Geographic.
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