The reach of literary Brooklyn grows ever larger, as local hub BookCourt mounts a $300,000 campaign to convert the “Bibliobarn,” 160 miles north in the Catskills, into a “bookshop, event space, and writers’ retreat.” Upstaters, lock up your house-cured salume and artisinally sharpened pencils!
Brooklyn is Coming to Eat Your Children
The Master Carpenter
“Better to close your eyes and carry on with your own work, pretending the master carpenter doesn’t exist.” Karl Ove Knausgaard reads Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission – one of the most anticipated books of 2015. Pair with this Millions essay on Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
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More Top Books for 2009
More lists of the top books of 2009 are coming out. Now up: Amazon's favorites. Tops on their list is Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, recently named a National Book Award finalist.
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Monday Linkday
My mom pointed out this article in the Washington Post about a bookstore in Baltimore that primarily gives away books rather than selling them. It's called the Book Thing:"That's the whole thing with the Book Thing," Wattenberg says. "All I am is a middleman. The people have books.... They give them to me, they're happy to have a place to see them go somewhere, and the people that get the books are happy to get the books."Also, file under conspicuous consumption: Anyone looking for an extravagant gift for the film buff in their life should look no further.Spotted on the el: The Travels of Marco Polo... sure the red line doesn't go all the way to China, but we can dream.
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Early Bird
Ready to feel bad about yourself? Good: a writer named Daisy Ashford wrote her first novel -- a 1919 bestseller -- when she was nine years old.
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Flexible Cinderella
On the persistent popularity and flexibility of Cinderella, from old folktales featuring talking gourds all the way to the upcoming Disney version, from NPR.
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Northrop Frye… “a prodigy whose promise was entirely fulfilled.”
The latest issue of the University of Toronto Magazine has an informative, if slightly hagiographical, tribute to the literary critic Northrop Frye. This year marks a century since his birth.
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