Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. You could also read Holloway McCandless on the author’s By Nightfall.
“Depression has a peculiar texture”
Sherlock Holmes at West Point
“Many students do not rate their knowledge very highly… they often doubt the possibility of mastering both pen and sword. A problem like this one, I realized not long ago, demands some special assistance. Thus, with all the earnest discretion of a Victorian lady in distress, I have appealed to none other than Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” The New Republic posts an essay on teaching Sherlock Holmes at West Point.
●
●
Whaleship Essex to Become BBC Documentary
The true story of the Whaleship Essex – which was deftly recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea – will soon be adapted into a 90-minute documentary for the BBC. As avid whale watchers already know, the plight of the Essex is what ultimately inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. You can get an overview of the disaster at Melville House’s blog, Moby Lives. (How appropriate!)
●
●
There Once Was a Girl
Recommended Reading: “There Once Was a Girl” by Katy Waldman at Slate. “Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison.”
●
●
Literary Writers in the Writers Room
Vanity Fair explores the change in attitude among the literati about writing for TV and notes that “[I]ncreasingly, the industry is ransacking bookshelves for adaptable novels and short stories. And fiction writers are becoming show-runners themselves.”