Recommended reading: What do you get the guy you can’t get anything else–the one with his own oil-rich country–like the Emir of Qatar? The LA Review recommends starting with the World Cup.
An Autocrat’s Guide to World Cup Qualification
Michael Chabon, Punk
Before he was Michael Chabon the novelist he was Michael Chabon the punk musician. Now recordings of his work with The Bats are available online as part of Mind Cure Records archival series.
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The Well
Anne Fernald writes about getting deep into her research: “Peering down isn’t enough, however. If you want to find the treasure that lies beneath the surface, you have to dive down into the well.”
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Get Your First Edition Fix
Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore just launched a First Editions Club where members get a signed first edition of a new book each month. Some recent selections include: George Saunders’s Tenth of December (our review), Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons (our review), and Philipp Meyer’s The Son.
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Kafka’s last living friend remembers
Alice Herz-Sommer, a 106-year-old Holocaust survivor and the last living person who knew Franz Kafka personally, reminisces about her friend in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Kafka was a slightly strange man…”
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“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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