Whether or not you believe that Oxford University Press is “the largest, most diverse and most respected university press in the world,” you’ll appreciate this review of a new history of the company, which goes through OUP’s origins, its relationship with its namesake and the opening of its New York office in 1896.
The Academic Life
Baldwin on the Bosphorus
“He combed through the sahaflar, the second-hand bookshops that line the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their dusty wares stacked on haphazard tables. He sat by the New Mosque, drinking tea out of tulip-shaped cups, playing backgammon, and watching the fishermen’s wooden boats launch into the dirty waters of the Golden Horn.” For Public Books, Suzy Hansen writes about James Baldwin‘s less-well-documented time in Istanbul. Pair with this piece from our pages about the famed author, race, and fatherhood.
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We Done Good
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Gigantic Film News
The Big Friendly Giant is coming to the big screen. Steven Spielberg will direct a live adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic book The BFG about a little girl and a friendly giant trying to stop his friends from eating children. If you had any doubt that Spielberg could bring sympathy to a mythical creature, he’ll be pairing up with E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison again.
“A testament to the ‘borderless world'”
Year In Reading contributor Scott Esposito interviewed László Krasznahorkai’s translator Ottilie Mulzet. Among the topics they discuss is Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai’s most recent novel. It will be published this spring.
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Look Who’s Talking Knau
“I could not do anything but wiggle, so I wiggled.” Here’s a fake excerpt from the non-existent seventh book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, helpfully titled Look Who’s Talking Knau.
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Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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