Writer Manjula Martin has been a stock girl, used bookseller, seamstress, waitress, retailer, Girl Friday- just to name a few of her day jobs. She questions the value of the artist’s day job in her VQR post. “Why are writers so eager to leave work behind?” she writes.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Hopefully You Won’t Start Any Agglethorpes
Got any big social engagements coming up on your calendar? Want to make a splash? Well here’s just the thing: memorize a whole heap of the words assembled in Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, which has been entirely digitized thanks to some kind souls. Then try to work them into as many conversations as you can. (h/t The Harlequin)
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include the much-hyped The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I. Also out in nonfiction is President Obama’s picture book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit), as reviewed by the New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and, for hip-hop fans, Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded.
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A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
Epistolary Criticism
Full Stop’s book club is discussing the stories of Clarice Lispector throughout this week in an in-depth email exchange conducted by contributors Becca Rothfeld and Nathan Goldman. Pair with Magdalena Edwards‘s Millions review of the collection.
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Sweet Enough to Eat
Time is running out! If you’re still dragging your feet on a Valentine’s card for your significant other, go check out these hilarious monstress valentines from Madeline Gobbo at The Toast. Her “Valentines for the Indifferent” from last year can still work, too.
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