Last month, in a review for The Millions, Chris Barsanti called George Packer’s The Unwinding an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.” Now, in The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu calls the book “decent, meticulous and concerned,” though it could have benefited from the “roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.”
A Story of Decline
The Chekhovian Rules of Writing
Anton Chekhov's rules for writing, as seen in an 1886 letter to his brother, include "total objectivity," "extreme brevity," and, of course, "compassion."
●
●
●
The Deepest Feeling
“Love / is the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.” Mary-Kay Wilmers for the London Review of Books reviews Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. In the book, Moore’s slightly-bizarre domestic life is examined with fairness and honesty alongside her impressive body of work. If poetry is your thing, check out our On Poetry column for more.
●
●
Combing The New Yorker’s Archives
If you’ve finished winding your way through Elise Liu’s recommended New Yorker articles – which, as of this week, are free to be read online – you can start working your way through Longform’s roundup of their 25 favorite unlocked pieces. (Or you can go even bigger, thanks to The Awl.)
●
●
The Ultimate Bestseller
This week in book-related infographics: Waterstones has put together an illustrated formula for the ultimate bestseller, “a thriller tale of crime, bondage and wizardry.”
●
●
The Invention of the Emoticon :(
If you thought the English language went downhill when the emoticon was introduced, you can blame a 17th-century poet. Editor Levi Stahl found that English poet Robert Herrick used the first emoticon in his 1648 poem “To Fortune.” As Herrick writes, “Tumble me down, and I will sit/ Upon my ruines (smiling yet :)” For more on the potential ruin of language, read Fiona Maazel’s piece on commercial grammar.
Citizen Bezos
Jeff Bezos married a novelist, “expressed a passionate devotion to books”, and may be the one person mild-mannered indie bookshop owners hate more than any other. How’d that happen? After perusing a short history from the New York Review of Books, see for yourself with our vintage news announcements on Amazon’s innovations in pay-per-page pricing, now-old products like the Kindle, and its industry-changing acquisitions of The Washington Post and the English language.
●
●
Gifts for the Bookish
The New Yorker Book Bench has posted its 2010 Holiday Gift Guide.
●
●