Amidst the tragic news that Iain Banks has cancer, The Telegraph responds with a headline for the ages: “Iain Banks taught me that books can be a hand grenade“
Lob One for Iain
Writing to Explain Yourself to Yourself
The Tide King author Jen Michalski shares a wonderfully honest account of how she managed to write her way out of the closet. “People, mostly nonwriters, are always surprised when I tell them I wrote so much growing up,” she says. “But those words, I want to tell them, weren’t written for anyone else – the audience who needed to see them and the audience for whom they were written was me.”
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Lavisium
Lord Byron is perhaps our most prominent example of an extravagant writer in a bygone age. There’s a reason his antics earned him a popular adjective. However, he’s not the only writer from long ago to live large, as made clear in this New Yorker piece by Elizabeth Kolbert -- inspired by the release of two new biographies -- that deals with the up-and-down life and reputation of Seneca. Sample quote: “Seneca’s fortune made possible a life style that was lavish by Roman or, for that matter, Hollywood standards.”
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“Republics of Imagination”
Our love of The Atlantic's By Heart series continues with Azar Nafisi's contribution to the series: an essay on reading James Baldwin, the importance of literature to democracy, and how ultimately "we need literature to remind us how like each other we are, despite our differences." Pair with Justin Campbell's Millions essay on race, fatherhood and reading Baldwin.
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“The meteor brought them into the mainstream”
If you’re like me, you thought three quick thoughts when you heard about the Chelyabinsk meteor: 1) I hope everybody is okay; 2) I hope The Possessed author Elif Batuman finds time to write about this; and 3) Thank goodness for Russian dashboard cameras.
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Look Who’s Talking Knau
"I could not do anything but wiggle, so I wiggled." Here's a fake excerpt from the non-existent seventh book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, helpfully titled Look Who's Talking Knau.
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The British Library Goes Digital
The British Library is launching a new iPad app that will eventually feature over 60,000 19th century books.
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