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
Mary Ruefle Reads Her Work
Listen to Mary Ruefle read two of her poems over at The Poetry Foundation: “White Buttons” and “Shalimar.”
To Believe Your Own Thought
Recommended Reading: Sophie Atkinson on Frank Ocean as Emersonian hero.
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Your Local Heroes
Thanks to the generosity of Daniel Handler, the American Library Association has launched the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. The prize will award $3,000 and an “odd, symbolic object” of Handler’s choosing to a librarian who “has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact.” (h/t The Paris Review)
That Was Fast
McCain speechwriter Mark Salter has been outed as the “Anonymous” behind the political novel O just two days after the book hit shelves.
Alexandre Dumas in the Kitchen
Most people know Alexandre Dumas for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, but fewer people are aware of what he considered his masterwork: Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine.
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Longreads
This January, Penguin Random House, Goodreads, Mashable and the National Book Foundation are sponsoring National Readathon Day, a holiday which encourages Americans to join together for a marathon reading session. If you’d like to take part, you can start a fundraiser to help support reading education, or else enlist your friends and family to read with you on January 24th from noon to 4 p.m.
Tuesday New Release Day: Elton; French; Michell; Merwin
Out this week: Time and Time Again by Ben Elton; According to Yes by Dawn French; The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell; and What Is a Garden? by W.S. Merwin.
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Oops Never Mind
Thriller writer James Patterson was set to publish a novel in November about an attempt on his author colleague Stephen King‘s life, subtly titled The Murder of Stephen King. Following reports of real-life threats against King, however, the book has been scuttled. After you’ve read that tale of high dudgeon, see also our editor-in-chief Lydia Kiesling’s essay, “Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King.”
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