Oh, look, the Paris Review freed Zadie Smith’s “Big Week” from the clutches of their paywall. (Bonus: you can subscribe to a dual subscription to both the Paris Review and the London Review of Books all summer long.)
Zadie Smith’s Big Week
Great to Not Great
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
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Like Reading How-To Manuals
James Hynes discusses the books he read when writing his latest novel, Next: “I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character.”
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Epic Listening
Speaking of podcasts: our own Epic Fail hits the Culture File podcast. Listen up!
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A Crook By Any Other Name
William Shakespeare: playwright, poet, and…potential tax evader. Turns out the Bard might not have been the nicest businessman.
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Bookstore Fairy
Recommended Reading: On the mysterious benefactors keeping St. Mark’s bookstore alive.
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A Library Without Walls
Robert Darnton at the New York Review of Books considers the feasibility of creating a National Digital Library: “I know: the devil can cite Jefferson. Anyone can cull through the papers of the Founding Fathers in order to find quotations in support of a cause. But I can’t resist.”
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American Public Libraries: A Visual History
Public libraries remain our country's greatest democratic institutions, but it took generations of work and social progress to get them to their current place as beacons to their communities.
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