Early on in her career, the poet Muriel Spark decided that Mary Shelley was criminally underrated as a writer. In bringing the Frankenstein author the fame she deserved, Spark wrote a biography, distanced Shelley from her famed poet husband and labeled her “the founder of science fiction.” (Related: our own Lydia Kiesling on Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.) (h/t Arts & Letters Daily)
Resurrecting Shelley
Thee, Compared
Recommended Reading: Adam Bertocci presents alternate forms for Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet.
Digital Tolstoy
“Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s entire body of work – all 90 volumes – along with comprehensive biographical materials has been posted online and will be available for free, a descendant said.”
●
●
America’s First Bohemians
Recommended reading: Brandon Ambrosino interviews Justin Martin, author of Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians, about, well, Walt Whitman and America’s first bohemians.
You Down with OED? Yeah, You Know Me.
“I’ve been hailed as a hero (hipster poets love me), gotten the rock star reception (by research librarians), and been dismissed with derision, thought possibly to be deranged,” says Jon Danzinger. So what’s his job, you might ask? He’s a researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Indie Bound
Naysayers, consider this: in the digital era, the brick-and-mortar bookstore might be experiencing a resurgence.
●
●
Big Budget Brontë Biopic in the Works
All three Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – will be the subject of a new “blockbuster biopic,” reports Telegraph & Argus. An announcement about the cast and crew will be made on April 21, 2016 – the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth date – but early speculation indicates that Harry Potter star Rupert Grint may play Branwell.
●
●
The Case for Reparations: An Ongoing Conversation
In order to prolong the conversation around his Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates recently took to Twitter to engage in a Q&A session with his readers. You can scroll through the entire exchange over here. Coates was also interviewed by Ezra Klein for Vox this week, and the resulting video is probably the most valuable piece of content that site has produced since its inception.
●
●
Mary Shelley’s authorship of Frankenstein is still disputed by some writers. It is a controversial subject – one only has to look at the comments on the Amazon page for John Lauritsen’s, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein.