Will Staehle designed the cover art for Michael Chabon’s latest novel, Telegraph Avenue (Millions review), and his finished project is certainly eye-catching. But what of the designs that didn’t make the final cut? Over at the Huffington Post, you can take a look at some of his other ideas.
Telegraph Alternates
The Most Boring Man in the World
“With thirteen other diners, the two professors of English first prepared and then made their way through eight courses, including beef broth, haddock, steak, mutton, chicken, and chocolate profiteroles….The dinner was a recreation of one eaten 132 years earlier, in one of England’s grandest country houses. Among the guests at this first dinner was George Scharf, founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a man not especially famous in his own day and virtually unknown in ours.” Love Among the Archives brings us into the world of George Scharf, a bachelor affectionately deemed “The Most Boring Man in the World.”
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Letters from the Artist as a Young Man
Jonathan Raban intersperses biographical information about William Gaddis in order to give the correspondence collected in his recently published Letters greater context. There are ample details about the author’s travels in his young adulthood, his artistic frustrations over the publication of The Recognitions, and, of course, many details about the women in Gaddis’s life. “In letters to his mother,” Raban writes, “Gaddis liked to depict himself as someone repeatedly smitten by beautiful women.” (Bonus: “The Letters of William Gaddis contains five letters addressed to me.”
Ruin-Reading
Junot Díaz is at home discussing his native Hispaniola as he muses on the function of apocalypse – New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan – in our global media landscape.
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Ishiguro + Gaiman + Genre
“Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?” Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman discuss The Buried Giant, fantasy and genre for the New Statesman. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s review of the novel.
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The Future of the University Library
The landscape of university library use is changing, along with the attendant ways in which academics and college students alike do research.
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A Royal Idea
Tired of all this business about the Royal wedding? Try learning about the five easy (even free!) ways you can support The Millions instead. Ta!
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Down Goes the Stout
In what was surely one of the most fun experiments of all time, a team of Irish scientists have finally figured out why Guinness stout bubbles fall instead of rise.