The Telegraph catches up with John Simpson as he prepares to retire from his role as chief editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. “I used to keep a notebook in my pocket in case I came across new words,” Simpson says at one point. “That worked until I put my trousers in the washing machine.”
“Our job is to analyse data, not to love words.”
Master of Happy Scenes
Norman Rockwell was an unhappy and enervated man who became iconic by painting scenes of happy, energetic people. He developed a style that became synonymous with idyllic visions of America. At Page-Turner, Lee Siegel reads Deborah Solmon’s American Mirror, a new biography of Rockwell that acknowledges the painter’s contradictions without “mocking or scolding” him for the gulf between his life and his art.
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Recommended Reading from Roxane Gay
Book Riot has compiled a list of Roxane Gay’s recommended reads via Twitter. Some of her choices include Citizen by Claudia Rankine, God Help the Child by Toni Morrison, and City on Fire by our own Garth Risk Hallberg. See more books Gay recommends in our Year in Reading column.
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The Neglected Nobelist, Neglected No More
Henrik Pontoppidan, the Danish novelist, won the 1917 Nobel Prize for literature. His masterpiece, Lucky Per, has never been available in English. Now – lucky for us – it is. Frederic Jameson reviews it for The London Review of Books.
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What’s The Rush?
Benjamin Percy makes the case for slowing down, “the best thing [he] ever did for my reading, which might be the best thing [he] ever did for [his] writing.”
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Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time.
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