Carve out some time today, and let Evan Smith Rakoff show you how a wonderful essay about Andy Griffith can also be about Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, John Keats, ambition, nostalgia, the Hollywood blacklist, class, and grief.
Mount Airy, North Carolina
Full Stop Blogger Call
Know some talented writers in need of a great platform? Full Stop is looking for bloggers to cover literature, film, music, politics, and a host of other topics.
The Son
He befriended Mark Twain. His father wrote The Scarlet Letter. He drank wine with Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and Henry James, and William Randolph Hearst once hired him as a reporter. He even published a few books to critical acclaim. So why do so few of us know anything about Julian Hawthorne? In the WaPo, Michael Dirda reviews a new biography. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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The Revolution Will Not Have Same-Day Shipping
"If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves." April 30th is Independent Bookstore Day. Celebrate early with a revisit to this 2012 essay by Ann Patchett on the resilience of the indie bookstore. Here's an interview with Janet Geddis, founder of Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA, on deciding to become a bookseller.
Unpublished DFW
This previously unpublished David Foster Wallace story, likely an excerpt from the Pale King manuscript, circulated as samizdat a couple of years back, but its reappearance - this time on some guy's tumblr page - is a good excuse to link to it.
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Keep It to Yourself
Recommended Reading: Against book lending and borrowing.
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