The Virginia Quarterly Review launched their redesigned website this week, and it’s a sight to behold. To celebrate the occasion, the magazine has dropped its paywall through Valentine’s Day, so start exploring. I recommend starting with Kevin Young’s recent poem, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” which he composed entirely out of song lyrics.
VQR Debuts Redesigned Website, Lifts Paywall
“When were they dead?”
Ever since her Wolf Hall novels hit the stage, people keep asking Hilary Mantel what it's like to have her characters come to life. She answers them with the question, "When were they dead?"
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The Literature of Skateboarding
Joel Rice has a new column up at McSweeney’s, in which he looks at “the literature of skateboarding.” All in all, this kind of reflective writing should pair nicely with Nick Courage’s fantastic Paris Review piece from last month. (Bonus: Rice’s column linked above also features a nice little bit of David Foster Wallace memorabilia.)
Academic Playground
Columbia once moved its twenty-two miles of books by sending them down a really, really long slide. As The Paris Review documents, in 1934, the university stocked its then-new Butler Library with a slide that ran from Low Library to the new building. (No word on whether the slide is secretly used to this day.)
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Musical Theories
We’ve written a fair bit about the By the Book series at the Times. You can read a selection of the best entries in a collection published by the paper. This week, the series featured another novel guest: Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Sample quote: “I don’t seek out books about music. I’ve read them over the years, but somehow, as a genre, it isn’t something I am specifically looking for.”
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Trouble in Paradise?
Surprise: the HuffPo/AOL link-up is proving to be messy.
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I “Love” This.
I'm glad someone started this blog of unnecessary quotations marks for me. (via @narrativemag).
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