Behind the Beautiful Forevers Headed to the Stage

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the “Albums of Our Lives” series over at The Rumpus. This week finds Ray Shea taking a look at The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree.

In November, Matt Kish will write a series of guest posts for Tin House’s Open Bar Blog. He’ll be “exploring some of the ideas and processes behind five of [his] Heart of Darkness illustrations.” Over on his personal blog, however, he’s asking for readers to help him select which five pieces he should discuss. Kish, who has previously illustrated the pages of Moby Dick, was recently mentioned in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.

Well, this is gorgeous. Nisa Maier curates a collection of photographs and stories meant to “capture the essence of every country on the planet.” The end result, Let’s Travel Somewhere, can take you from India to Cuba, or from Russia to New Zealand.

Have you ever wanted to convert a book into a patent application? Well now you can.

Do you have what it takes to be a judge in The Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books? If so, your application better be in by midnight Friday.

Why not follow in the footsteps of writers such as David Foster Wallace and play some tennis?

In an interview with America Magazine, Pope Francis admits that the authors he most admires are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johann Hölderlin, The Betrothed author Alessandro Manzoni, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also goes on to share an interesting anecdote about his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges: “In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by [the secondary school] boys [I was teaching]. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”