If you’ve ever wondered how old your favorite authors were when they hit their creative peaks, you’ll enjoy this graphic, which charts the ages at which well-known writers published their most famous works.
Early Birds
On people braver than us:
Erika Anderson recites her teenage poetry at readings and shares her reasoning for doing so. “I want to live where irony meets kindness, where daring meets bullshit, where everything that failed meets the hope that something might not. I hope my readers do too.”
All Places Are Temporary
Is he a vandal? Is he a post-Situationist? Maybe the text-art Banksy? Who knows. One thing is for sure – Scottish poet Robert Montgomery is taking his poetry to the streets.
Kindles to Kenya
David Risher founded the nonprofit Worldreader program in 2009 to distribute Kindles to children in the developing world. His aim was to increase literacy. Today the program has shared over 200,000 e-books with children in Ghana and Kenya, and Risher and his colleagues hope to allocate 10,000 reading devices by 2013.
“First you take a drink … then the drink takes you.”
At The Daily Beast, Jimmy So writes about F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s penchant for alcohol. This article is best paired with On Booze, a new collection of previously unpublished Fitzgerald snippets.
Sleep Talkin’ Man
“I can’t control the kittens. Too many whiskers! Too many whiskers!” A woman writes down everything her husband says in his sleep. Why isn’t this on Twitter? (via attackattack.tumblr.com)
Folk Lore
If his new novel Against the Country is any indication, Ben Metcalf gets his best inspiration from the worst of rural America. In the book, which features a panoply of awful crimes and obscenities, Metcalf rides roughshod over the notion of the rural idyll. In Bookforum, onetime Millions staffer Emily Colette Wilkinson reviews the novel, calling it “a gut-busting knee slapper” in spite of its glut of macabre scenes.
So Many Pompadours
In the game of girlhood classics written during the nineteenth century, the correct answer to Little Women versus Anne of Green Gables is clearly Betsy-Tacy.