Our own Elizabeth Minkel has been posting sights and quotations from a recent George R. R. Martin and Robin Hobb event in London. You can check out her coverage over on Tumblr.
George and Robin
Yaffa S. Santos on Going Beyond the Five Senses
On The Road With DFW, Part II
At Condalmo, Matthew Tiffany‘s review of David Lipsky’s new book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace: “You can’t go more than two or three pages without Lipsky’s shadow falling over the text. And you aren’t reading this book for the Lipsky, are you? The biggest problem here is that, like it or not, his fingerprints are all over it. And I didn’t like it.”
A Man in Monte Carlo
It will take you longer to read this Curiosity and click through to its attached link than it would for you to simply read Anton Chekhov’s shortest-ever short story in its entirety.
Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time.
The Spivet App
Always pushing the envelope in terms of how we think about books, Reif Larsen has just announced an iPad app for his novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. As the demo video suggests, this something with much more depth and interaction than just a simple port from print to digital.
Paprikitis
Our own Garth Risk Hallberg cops to a serious case of “Hungarophilia” in his New York Times review of Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13.