John Green, Tina Fey, and “a book-swapping/speed-dating cocktail hour”: BookExpo America has taken over Manhattan’s Javitz Center, and if you live anywhere near New York we think you might want to check out the public BookCon event this Saturday. We’re not saying you’ll meet the love of your life, but maybe you’ll win the Hunger Games trivia contest.
BookExpo America
Rejoice, Ye Antiquarians
This one is for all you antiquarians out there. The oldest known draft of the most widely read work in all of English literature, the King James Bible, has been discovered in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. William Shakespeare’s books have also sold a ton of copies, and here’s an essay from The Millions that imagines him as a kind of God, Himself.
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At What Age?
This week in book-related infographics: a look at "What Age Do Writers Publish Their Most Famous Works?" from Electric Literature.
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Galileo’s Taste; Galileo’s Work; Galileo’s Life
Can Galileo’s literary preferences teach us about “the unusual and creative features of his physics?” John L. Heilbron thinks so.
“All dialogue? Really?”
Seeing as the latest Dave Eggers book consists of all dialogue, it’s a good time to look back on the history of all-dialogue novels. Alexander Kalamaroff, writing for The Rumpus, identifies a few examples, among them The Waves by Virginia Woolf and numerous works in Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.
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First Novel Prize Longlist
The Center for Fiction has released the longlist for the First Novel Prize. The Girls by Emma Cline (see our review) and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (see our review) are among the novels to make the cut.
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Will the real Don Draper please stand up?
Chicago Magazine's charming 2009 profile of Draper Daniels, a.k.a. the real life Don Draper, written by Myra Janco Daniels, a.k.a. his wife.
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Lost Words in Dead Language
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Playing the Victim
The Empathy Exams, a new collection of essays by Leslie Jamison, gets its title from a piece about medical acting that was published in The Believer. On the Harper’s blog, you can read an interview with Jamison, who calls her collection “a refusal to choose between these approaches — criticism, confession, journalism.” (Michelle Huneven interviewed Jamison for The Millions a couple of years ago.)
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