Lit Mag Unlocked
Card Collection
Now that the Library of Congress is shut down, it’s as good a time as any to remember why we have it in the first place. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova looks through a collection of vintage catalog cards, two of which include early entries for A Room of One’s Own and Ulysses.
●
●
A great hater of bad books.
The true confessions of Lev Grossman, book reviewer: “There was a time when I actually believed, because I was an ass, that as a critic I was an avenging angel with a flaming sword, and that part of my job was to help rid the culture of books that were sucking up more of the literary oxygen than they deserved.”
●
●
A Little Too Into It
Novels that focus on obsessive characters hinge on persnickety details. The need to depict accurately the mind of an obsessive demands that the novelist overemphasize the trifling and tangential. In The Kenyon Review, Vanessa Blakeslee reviews a new and representative example of the form, The Understory by Pamela Erens. Sample quote: “When the smaller steps of daily life are magnified, does that narrative reach its greatest potential for a unified and powerful resonance?” FYI, Erens has written for us.
Page Views
Sometime Millions contributor and New York Daily News editorial staffer Alexander Nazaryan has kicked off the Daily News‘ new literary blog, Page Views. Nazaryan says, “you may not think of the tabloid as a particularly literary format, but we are going to challenge your assumptions of what constitutes literary/cultural reporting in this town.” His first post, “Don’t tell me the book is dead,” went live this morning.
More Kindle Price Cuts
Amazon is continuing the Kindle price cut action, introducing a new, enhanced version of the larger Kindle DX (this is the one that’s optimized for things like reading newspapers) and dropping the price by over $100.
The Other Side
“Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places.” Luc Sante’s new book, The Other Paris, seeks to uncover Paris’s sedimentary layers of filth and grit. Here he is in an interview with Guernica Magazine.
●
●
Story from Lucia Berlin
Recommended Reading: “The Musical Vanity Boxes” by Lucia Berlin at Electric Literature.
●
●
One comment: