Somehow we knew that Gary Shteyngart had a pretty interesting childhood. As Andy Borowitz explains in a review of Little Failure, the author’s new memoir, the elder Shteyngart regaled his son with “outlandish” stories, most notably “a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork.” You can learn what the author likes to read today in his Year in Reading piece.
Foul Swine
Read Me an E-Book
Can kids’ books on a tablet beat the real thing? A father of two takes a reading test.
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The Best of Last (Crusade)
I’m shocked that this is even open to debate. Emily Asher-Perrin on why Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best of all Indy films.
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#long and #longer still
A #mediumread on the origin of #longreads and longform.org.
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Twain and Keller
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 in which the author has dinner with Helen Keller.
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The Recuyell Sells
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, the first book published in English, recently sold at auction for almost 2 million dollars.
Slow Down, September!
There was a lot going on this September. Luckily, the good folks over at The Literary Hub have provided us with this helpful list of five of the best new books September had to offer. A personal favorite includes Emily Donoghue’s The Wonder, in which the protagonist appears to be subsisting on nothing but water.
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Your Thoughts on Painters?
“Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.” Michael Thomsen makes the case that dating writers is a bad idea.
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