The folks at Harper’s Bazaar (not Harper’s Magazine) are launching a new short story competition, and the grand prize is wild: an all-expenses-paid weeklong stay on a private Scottish island, publication in the May 2014 issue of the magazine and a first-edition book from the Asprey’s Fine and Rare Books Department, worth up to £3,000. (And yes, that’s pounds, not dollars.)
Our Lucrative Profession
Bad Times
In her new book The Sixth Extinction, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert makes the case that we’re living in the sixth massive die-off of species in our planet’s history. Corraling evidence from zoologists, environmentalists and more, Kolbert argues that human activity is the cause of this latest event. In a review over at Vulture, Kathryn Schulz writes that Kolbert “makes a page-turner out of even the most sober and scientifically demanding aspects of extinction.”
Lovely Soprano
In the current Broadway production of Twelfth Night, Mark Rylance plays Olivia, a role which sees him plaster his face in white makeup and style his hair into a “pouf like a charcoal brioche.” Rylance, the first artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, projects such a palpable “air of distracted grief” in his performance that “the carapace of theatricality evaporates,” Charles Isherwood writes. The Times theater critic also highlights the work of John Douglas Thompson and Harriet Walter.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Pochoda, Schine, Bolaño
New this week: Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda, Fin & Lady by Cathleen Schine, and, available for the first time ever as ebooks, Roberto Bolaño’s masterpieces 2666 and The Savage Detectives. There are many, many more anticipated books on offer in our big second-half preview, published this week.
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The Equity Series Live
Year in Reading alum Vinson Cunningham will be in conversation with Darren Walker and Crystal Williams at MoMA next Friday, March 11 as a part of the Equity Series. Watch it on live-stream at 6:30 p.m. EST.
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Isabelle Eberhardt, Dependent on Chance
The Paris Review's excellent column, "Feminize Your Canon," returns with Isabelle Eberhardt, a cross-dressing Swiss explorer and author who published under a male pseudonym as a teenager.
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“The best house bourbon was Ten High”
Following up their publication of Charles Portis’s “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” online, the Oxford American brings us a speech in verse by Jay Jennings, the editor of a recent compilation of Portis’s work (which our own Bill Morris reviewed). Jennings delivered an ode to Portis to mark the author winning the Porter Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. Sample quote: “But you read the next book because the main character was from Little Rock,/and you knew no other book where the main character was from Little Rock/and you wanted to write a book about Little Rock.”
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