George Dobbs explores the history of some common cliches for The Airship and makes an elegant argument for being aware of overused phrasing: “The worst fiction might never go beyond widely used tropes, but the best fiction starts with an awareness of them.” We agree, and also hope never to read “It was a dark and stormy night…” again.
Before “Once Upon A Time”
Best Translated Book 2010
The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven and translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu has won the 2010 Best Translated Book Award. Previously: The shortlist.
Should’ve Read The Lease
“On the day I moved in, without giving it any thought, we started to refer to one storage space—there are three, two low-ceilinged ones on either side of the pitch-roofed room and one closet—as ‘the bad area.’ We had barely walked in, we (at least I) had forgotten the ghost, and here we were—‘the bad area.’” Amie Barrodale writes at The Paris Review Daily about life in a haunted apartment.
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Depravity’s Rainbow
The #AuthorSexts trending topic had us rolling the other day, and now you can revisit some of the best submissions thanks to Electric Literature.
The Complete Spy Magazine, Now Online
Like a time machine to the first Bush Administration, the complete archives of the late, lamented, and hugely influential Spy Magazine are now apparently available through Google Books (via). We’d offer a few keywords to get you started, but the riches are too many. Okay, fine. You twisted our collective arm. Ivana Trump. Henry Kissinger. O.J. Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathalon. Go nuts.
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The Age-Old Tradition
Scientists are using x-ray to read fragments of 1,300-year-old manuscripts that have been reused as bookbindings. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
Through a Bell Darkly
As you may have heard, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sylvia Plath. It also, not coincidentally, marks the release of two new biographies: American Isis (the first to draw material from the recently-opened Ted Hughes archive) and Mad Girl’s Love Song (which looks at the poet’s relationship with her “big, dark, hunky boy”). Emma Garman weighs the impact of all this new scholarship at Salon.
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