Recommended Reading: The Orphan Master’s Son author Adam Johnson penned a long profile of Kim Jong-Il’s “personal chef, court jester, and sidekick,” and it’s every bit as wild as you’re probably imagining.
“Fujimoto would never see him apologize again.”
Rural Fever
Considering an anthology about writers leaving New York came out last year (with a contribution by our own Emily St. John Mandel), it makes sense that we should now look back on the career of E.B. White, who gave up his Manhattan apartment for a farm in rural Maine.
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On the Voynich Manuscript
You can lose entire days while researching the Voynich Manuscript on the Internet, so maybe you should begin with this overview of the matter – one that asks whether or not the entire thing is just a big hoax.
A Drawn Out Illustration
Twelve days after Gustave Flaubert died, a friend cataloged the writer’s personal effects. 48,311 days later, Joanna Neborsky illustrated them.
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Border Borrowing
The Haskell Free Library straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Enter the library in the United States, and browse through the books in Canada.
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Ah, the Humanities!
Nicholas Dames is a wonderful writer, and I suggest you read his essay on the "crisis" in the Humanities.
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New Short Story by DFW
"Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body." The New Yorker posts a new short story, "Backbone," by David Foster Wallace.
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A Body Like Mine
The number of options presented to people dating today can be overwhelming and sometimes weird. Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine touches on this subject, posing “questions about wanting and having and bodies and food and sex that often arise in discussions about how people date today.” Natasha Lewis reviews the book in The New Republic.
Most Overrated Books
The Most Overrated Books of 2011 according to NY Daily News, and Steve Jobs is included?
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