Before the regime change in Burma, Ye Htet Oo ran a secret library even though he risked facing “three months in jail for every book he lent without permission from the censorship board.”
The Rebel Librarian
The Many Lives of Yoram Kaniuk
“After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died.” Nicole Krauss remembers her relationship with Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, author of The Last Jew, in her obituary for The New Yorker.
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How Writers Read Vol. 2
I’ve written before about The Believer‘s “How Writers Read” series, and now the second installment, which includes questions about guilty reading and the constant debate between short and long books, is online.
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Not to be Rude
Apologies for bringing this up, but in a WaPo review of Sorry!: The English and their Manners, Jonathan Yardley points out that your average English person says “sorry” eight times a day.
Early Buzz
In his look ahead to interesting books coming out in 2011, Scott Esposito includes the book I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, which features pieces by Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, and several other great writers and is due out in March.
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Curiosities: Precise Obfuscation
“Chris Lloyd adores a minuet / the Ballets Russes and crepes suzettes / but Foucault loves to rock n’ roll / a hot dog makes him lose control… what a crazy pair!”James Yeh and a plate of Korean barbecue co-star in: My Dinner with Shteyngart.Deborah Eisenberg reads Wells Tower.Open Letters Monthly looks at Landscape in Concrete, a lost classic from the World War II-era featuring a not-so-ÜbermenschWhat planet are translators from? Paul Verhaeghen spills the beans, in remarks from the PEN festival, (via Three percent)Novelist David Francis, guest-posting at TEV, pits the writer’s interests against those of the publishing industry.W.W. Norton “friends” the Dalkey Archive.Richard Ford tells Nam Le, “Giving a colleague a bad review is like . . . seeing a hitchhiker and rather than picking the hitchhiker up, you run over him.”The Second Pass reappraises Denis Johnson’s 1983 Angels (whose characters reappear in Tree of Smoke).Finally, a piece on Reif Larsen’s T.S. Spivet that doesn’t mention the size of his advance.After only a year, Wyatt Mason’s fine Sentences blog reaches a full stop.An amazing and cute fashion blog from a 13-year-old.The indie bookstore tour writ large: novelist Mark Fitten is visiting 100 indie bookstores and writing about it. (via Maud)Wikipedia find of the week: The Jimmy Carter rabbit incident
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Book-Related Internet Graphics
Today in book-related graphics: The Arts Shelf has created an infographic measuring famous literature by word count, and The New York Times provides a handy, illustrated guide to any writers’ retreat, complete with authors’ cloisters and an “emergency idea generator.”
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