To celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 2016, he’s getting a makeover. Jeanette Winterson is writing a cover of The Winter’s Tale, and Anne Tyler will be revamping The Taming of the Shrew for a 21st century audience. While you wait, watch Joss Whedon’s update of Much Ado About Nothing.
The Bard 2.0
Good Clean Fun
Nick Offerman is a jack of all trades—since leaving Parks and Recreation, he has performed in a stage production of A Confederacy of Dunces, and now he’s about to publish his third book, Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Workshop. He sat down for an interview with Etsy this week.
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Picador Playlists
The gulf between Picador and every other publishing house continues to yawn in one major aspect: literary playlists. To honor the release of Dylan Jones’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music, Justin Hargett put together a list of his “Favorite Covered Songs!” (Previously: the “Marriage Playlist” for Jeffrey Eugenides)
Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken, discusses her life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination."
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For Auld Lang Syne
“A perfect example of what the short story can do when the form is at its best: containing as much of an emotional blow as that of a 800-page novel, regardless of its brevity.” The Guardian awards its 4th Estate BAME short story prize to "Auld Lang Syne" by Lisa Smith. The prize was launched in 2015 in response to a report “which found that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers struggled both to get published and against stereotypes imposed by the UK’s overwhelmingly white publishing industry.”
The Gray Salt Sea, The Wine-Dark Sea
Writing for Lapham’s Quarterly, Caroline Alexander takes a deep dive into Homer’s “wine-dark sea” to uncover the origins and meaning behind the poet’s “incomprehensible” phrase.
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