The last meal is a curious staple of modern executions, not least because it involves, in the words of one death-row inmate, “putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, an essay on the ritual’s history, one that includes mention of famous last meals like terminally ill French President Francois Mitterrand’s final dinner of “Marennes oysters, foie gras, and two ortolan songbirds.”
One Last Taste
His Gift for Matching Books to Reviewers Was Uncanny
“He was surely the greatest literary editor there has ever been – brilliant, autocratic, endlessly curious and possessed of an extraordinary fund of knowledge about a vast range of subjects. True, he was not always easy to deal with, but when has the best ever been easy?” John Banville on the late Robert Silvers.
The Wrath of the Translator
The English Illiad, compared: a look at the translations of Robert Fagles, Anthony Verity, Stephen Mitchell, and more.
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Laura Amy Schlitz Interview
Newbery Medalist and Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! author Laura Amy Schlitz was interviewed for Publisher’s Weekly. She discussed her latest novel, Splendors and Glooms, which “allowed [Schlitz] to marry two of her passions in a single work – [Charles] Dickens and marionettes,” as well as her “half-hour, one-page trick” for writing.
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A Weary, Frumpy Civil Servant
J.K. Rowling’s new play will not, as everyone had imagined, be a prequel to the Harry Potter series. Instead, it will be a sequel, with the main action taking place 19 years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and focusing on Harry’s youngest son, Albus Severus. Here’s a self described “jaded, contrarian” take on Rowling and the series as a whole from The Millions.
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Talk About That
“Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.” On Freud.
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