Is there a better way to honor Norman Mailer than by throwing a few punches? Nate Freeman was bored at the book party for J. Michael Lennon’s new biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, so he got into a drunken fist fight in Mailer’s apartment. We bet Mailer would approve.
In the Ring with Norman Mailer
Where the Wild Things Are
“After breaking down the data by neighborhood and age group, it became clear: Children’s books are a rarity in high-poverty urban communities. The likelihood that a parent could find a book for purchase in these areas ‘is very slim.’” On book deserts across America.
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Murakami’s Advice
Have a question? A problem? A query about cats? Haruki Murakami has answers and advice.
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The Scream
Edvard Munch’s The Scream recently garnered a record breaking $119.9 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Despite the “tasty narrative potential” of the iconic artwork, the Pulitizer Prize winning art critic Holland Cotter thinks that the painting’s new owner spent their vast sum of money unwisely.
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Convergences
Recommended Reading: Andrea Denhoed on Flannery O’Connor.
Blursing In Disguise
“A dictionary is just a book, a product, no different from Fifty Shades of Grey and only slightly better written.” A few rules for making up words.
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The Queens Bookshop Initiative
What can make the world a better place? Books. Check out this Kickstarter to bring a bookstore to Queens.
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Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.
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An Interactive Diary
The London Review of Books has created an interactive map of their diary entries. Check out where 100 of their authors were writing.