Senior New York Times book critic Dwight Garner talked with Prospect Magazine about his career and the literary landscape. Of the new online critical publications, which ones did the interviewer single out for compliments? Answer: the LARB and The Millions. (Aw.)
Similes Like Bombs
This is Your Brain on Art
Proust Was a Neuroscientist author Jonah Lehrer explains exactly how the brain is able to perceive art.
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Crowd-source Everything
In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree “in aggregate about the quality of a book,” non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be “more eclectic,” “more supportive of debut authors,” and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.
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Crime and Punishment and Singing
Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment is getting the musical treatment, and though “it does not seem the most likely candidate to provide musical fun for all the family” for a long list of reasons – “heavy drinking, prostitution, a double axe murder and hours of psychological torment” – we’re already planning our trips to Moscow for the premier. This is also a good opportunity to revisit the debate over who’s greater, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?
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Poets on Poets
Editing poetry can be tricky, and the work is often misunderstood. Many of the best houses leave the work to the experts: actual poets. But is that the best route? Indeed, as this Telegraph article puts it, “a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.”
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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The mystery of the skull that might once have sat between the shoulders of one William Shakespeare will remain unresolved for now. A senior church lawyer for St. Leonard’s Church in Beoley, Redditch, has barred the group of curious clergymen from removing the skull for DNA testing. Alas, poor William.
You Will Survive
“You can only advocate for yourself when you know what it is you want from the experience. You’d be surprised by how many people go into this process and are unclear about what they hope to get out of it.” Over at the Amazon Author Insights blog, Katrin Schumann offers a checklist of seven tips to survive submitting your writing to editors, including this note about articulating your goals beforehand. (Ed. note: Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!)
“You were a dream of ice.”
Recommended Reading: Delaney Nolan’s “Buoyed Nets or a Towered Light Spinning”
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Dificil
Growing up, Judy Bolton-Fasman watched her mother study Don Quixote, propping the book up on their kitchen counter while studying for her Master’s in Spanish literature. Her mother was a native speaker, but Cervantes was still a tough writer to figure out, especially if you were reading his work while trying to cook dinner in the background. The author looks back on her mother’s education in a Saturday Essay for The Rumpus.
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