Roz Chast, whose cartoons have been mainstays in the New Yorker for quite some time, has teamed up with Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields to write a book about the 101 two-letter words allowed in Scrabble.
This Post Reads Like Mad Libs.
Just Add Anthony Hopkins
Hitchcock’s North By Northwest is a great film…but is it perfect?
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Reading the VIDA Count
Yesterday, VIDA released its annual count of women in prominent magazines, and while they found that most of the magazines they looked at still publish significantly more men than women, they reported that The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review published many more women in 2013 than they did in 2012. Amanda Hess takes a look at VIDA’s findings at Slate.
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Beware of the Gravedigger
Recommended Reading: On the literary tradition of objectifying and consuming women’s corpses.
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Is Social Publishing the Future?
Loudpoet has an interview with former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash about his new social publishing venture Cursor. ““Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.” Is this a way forward for beleaguered publishers? (via The Lone Gunman)
My Life, Abridged
Chekhov never published an autobiography, but he did once write a letter in which, in Chekhovian fashion, he summed up his life in a paragraph. At The Paris Review Daily, you can read the Constance Garnett translation of this letter in full. You could also check out Brendan Mathews on reading Chekhov for self-improvement.
Creepy Cervantes
A team of archaeologists just found Cervantes‘s body, and while that seems like a fun literary and historical event, the New Yorker‘s Ilan Stevens has a slightly different perspective: “Frankly, there is something creepy about bringing Cervantes back from the dead.”
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