Does getting up early make you a better writer? Not necessarily according to Maria Popova’s infographic of authors’ wake up times paired with their overall productivity (books published and awards won). The findings: Writers who sleep in write more but win fewer awards than early birds. Our conclusion: Just get up whenever you want.
The Big Sleep
That’s Not Leather
In horrifying book news, the binding of one of Harvard College Library’s books has been confirmed to be human skin.
More on Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison’s new essay collection is getting lots of plaudits, not least here at The Millions, where Ryan Teitman argued that Jamison manages to “meet her subjects in utter intimacy.” At the Tin House blog, Stephen Sparks interviews Jamison, who talks about the book, her “shame-seeking superpower” and her epigraph-cum-tattoo.
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I will tell you this Rosalina, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy.
From Werner Herzog’s letter to Rosalina, the woman he employs to keep his house: “Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while organizing the recycling, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.”
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Primary Colors for the Age of Obama
Anonymous strikes again: On January 25th, the entity that brought us 1996’s deliciously scandalous Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, offers a roman à clef for the Obama age: O: A Presidential Novel. Then it was Joe Klein, but this Anon. is still Anon. Perhaps better than the insider gossip: The media-fueled whodunit the novel’s sure to inspire.
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The Science of Poetry
The relationship between poetry and science is more inextricably (and historically) linked than you might imagine: “In the late 1700s, scientific treatises were written in poetic form because poetry was considered the language of intellect and the future.”
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Bad for Books
“The idea that a ‘book of the year’ can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer.” Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian about why the Man Booker Prize “is bad for writers.” And in these pages, Mark O’Connell asks why we care about literary awards at all.
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ZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!