Sesame Street turned in a literary puppet parody in their Sons of Anarchy send-up: Sons of Poetry.
“You Need a Rhyming Word? That’s What We Heard!”
Turkey Days
Happy almost-Thanksgiving to our American readers! To celebrate, why not whip up a nice bowl of Everyone Get the Hell Out of of the Kitchen Right Now Before I Kill All of You Cranberry-Orange Dressing and pray that none of your other recipes have mistakes in them.
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For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
Curiosities
Sam Sacks offers up a review of Booker winner The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga for Open Letters"Obama spotted carrying poetry book" - It was Collected Poems 1948-1984 by Derek WalcottThe amazing, exhaustive, 7-part, behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign from NewsweekRahm, Ari, Zeke: Which Emmanuel brother are you?In case you weren't already tired of this... the n+1 vs. the lit-blogs row of early 2007 lands in an academic journal. Our own contribution to the saga is duly noted.Wyatt Mason offers more thoughts on John Leonard (via Conversational Reading)Malcolm Gladwell's latest, The Outliers, hits stores a week from today. Gladwell introduces the book in a video at Amazon (scroll down a bit).Oxford researchers figure out the ten most annoying phrases.And the New Oxford American Dictionary has named its Word of the Year: hypermiling.As we remember Michael Crichton, "The Top 5 'Crazy' Michael Crichton Ideas That Actually Came True"Nam Le wins the Dylan Thomas Prize. We interviewed him in August.
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A Bookish Jurassic Park
Recommended reading: before you head to the theaters for the latest Jurassic Park film, make sure you know the series's bookish roots.
Goodreads Celebrates Its Tenth Birthday
"We started with just the two of us, and now it’s the largest reading community in the world.” Publishers Weekly interviewed Goodreads founders Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler about the site they founded 10 years ago, which now boasts 65 million members. Check out our own Edan Lepucki on Goodreads' humble beginnings.