Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Brian Warfield’s forthcoming novella Bridges No Longer Span These Waters.
“As if they didn’t exist.”
The Great Tranquility
“Yehuda Amichai’s genius lies in how—to borrow from his own language—he makes metaphor ‘useful.’ He thinks metaphorically, and in so doing he makes stories of them, treating his likenesses as if they were not metaphorical but animated literalisms. That’s why, I suspect, his metaphors have not merely poetic power but practical vitality, in the way that a horse is not only alive but usefully alive.” Every time James Wood publishes a big profile in The New Yorker, it’s worth a read; this week’s essay on the “secular psalmist” and poet Yehuda Amichai is no different.
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Reading Aloud and Clear
“My wife likes to drive. I like to read aloud. So, she takes me places, and I take her places. It’s a match made in heaven — or at least in a Honda.” In honor of World Read Aloud Day, book critic Ron Charles writes about his love of reading out loud for the Washington Post. Pair with: an essay about the importance of reading aloud as adults.
Borders Leftovers
At The Daily Beast, our own Bill Morris goes to a Borders store closing due to bankruptcy to see what remains once all the good books have been picked clean.
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And All That Jazz
Have you ever wondered what The Great Gatsby would sound like? Designer Vladimir V. Kuchinov made The Generative Gatsby, a book that features typography based on famous 1920s jazz songs. “The following work is a visual experiment, a study of how music of this era, its rhythms, syncopations and patterns could alter prose to a new typographic frontiers keeping content legible as it could be,” he writes on his website.
Top Travel Books
Travel site WorldHum has created a top-100 travel books of all time list. The list includes many Millions favorites (Theroux, Kapuscinski, etc).
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Questions for Ms. Heller
Bethanne Patrick of The Book Studio interviews Zoe Heller about her latest novel The Believers.
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Words on the street.
Ian Crouch on the place of real estate in the novel, and its tenedency to “reinforce our modern sense that the appearance of our houses, and the taste and class that they represent, are among the defining elements of modern selfhood.”