In her new book The Sixth Extinction, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert makes the case that we’re living in the sixth massive die-off of species in our planet’s history. Corraling evidence from zoologists, environmentalists and more, Kolbert argues that human activity is the cause of this latest event. In a review over at Vulture, Kathryn Schulz writes that Kolbert “makes a page-turner out of even the most sober and scientifically demanding aspects of extinction.”
Bad Times
When James met Wilde
Oscar Wilde: a “fatuous fool,” a “tenth-rate cad,” and an “unclean beast?” According to Henry James, all of the above.
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Smith Wins Bailey’s
Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both has won the Bailey’s Prize for women’s fiction, placing her in the same ranks as Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. If you’re not too familiar with Smith’s work, Jonathan Russell Clark wrote about her for The Millions last year.
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Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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Supply and Demand
A London book dealer declares “The Great Book Glut of 2010.”
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Everyone’s Writing
“Every month, Literary Hub, Electric Lit, and Catapult engage more than two million people with serious writing and contemporary writers, instead of leaving them to play Candy Crush or what-have-you.” Meet the man behind Lit Hub, Electric Lit, and Catapult, Andy Hunter. For reflections on the world of print, Nick Ripatrazone writes on the literary magazine and getting paid.
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Yang Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature
On Monday, Gene Luen Yang became the first graphic novelist to be named a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. We have interviewed Yang and reviewed The Shadow Hero.
A Most Terrible State
Yesterday I told you about a ridiculously rare signed copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem famously loaded with coldness and sterility and failed human intimacy. Later this month, some new letters will be published that reveal the depth of Eliot’s mental anguish over the breakdown of his first marriage with his wife, Vivien. Eliot has long been accused (maybe fairly) of treating Vivien with intolerable cruelty and attributing to her mental state, and these letters aim to complicate that narrative.
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