He befriended Mark Twain. His father wrote The Scarlet Letter. He drank wine with Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and Henry James, and William Randolph Hearst once hired him as a reporter. He even published a few books to critical acclaim. So why do so few of us know anything about Julian Hawthorne? In the WaPo, Michael Dirda reviews a new biography. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
The Son
Deep, Hungry Gulps
“My idea of the ideal literary dinner party remains locking a book under my left wrist while conveying risotto to my mouth with my right at the kitchen table.” Stacy Schiff talks literary dinner parties and more in this week’s New York Times By the Book column. Schiff’s latest, The Witches: Salem, 1692, is out this week.
To the Boys of the Street
University of Alabama graduate student Amanda Moore has written a powerful “Open Letter to the Boys of the Street” in which she addresses the troubling and all-too-apparent issue of street harassment. Meanwhile, photographer Hannah Price shares striking images of the Philadelphia men who’ve catcalled her.
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“Irish writers tell stories differently”
St. Patrick’s Day is over but there’s always cause to celebrate Irish storytellers. (Plus March is Irish-American History Month!) In this video from Open Road Media, you can listen to Edna O’Brien, Joseph Caldwell, Ken Bruen and T.J. English discuss the components of Irish storytelling that make for such good craic. Also you can check out the Poetry Foundation’s collection of St. Patrick’s Day poems for additional (belated) Irish writing.
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Curiosities: As Compiled by a Hologram
So much to hate: The Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America 2008Bookshelves gone wild: Plant your tree of knowledge next to your literary playground.At the Vroman's Bookstore blog, Patrick talks about why "books need more time," and looks at how one book is getting more than the one week it was given.n+1 launches N1BR, the book review supplement to n+1. One of the editors is Nikil Saval, who appeared in our Year in Reading series in 2008.The earliest celluloid film (from 1888) can be found - where else - on YouTube. (From The List Universe's "Top 10 Incredible Early Firsts In Photography")As if it wasn't already hard enough to get up for work in the morning: Our world may be a giant hologramJack Shafer responds to David Carr's call to "invent an iTunes for News."
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Coda
Sad that Mad Men is over? We've got just the thing. Back in 2012, our own Hannah Gersen compiled a list of ten books to read when a given season -- or, in this case, the series -- comes to an end.
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Drawing Straws
Recommended Reading: How to tell if you’re in a Shirley Jackson story.
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Modern Anxiety
"I think dystopian novels are really about present anxiety, aren’t they?" Chang-rae Lee said in an interview for the Daily Beast's "How I Write" series. His dystopian novel, On Such a Full Sea, was part of our 2014 book preview.
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Wood on JJS
Critic and occasional Millions commenter James Wood has added his own two cents to the growing collection of Pulphead reviews.
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