Slate has translated famous first lines of literature into emojis, and they’re surprisingly coherent. Pair with Jonathan Russell Clark‘s essay on opening sentences.
Literature in Emojis
Short Stories for Sale
Wharton is the Original Gossip Girl
On this week's New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Rebecca Mead recommends (seriously) Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth -- "the real thing" -- for teen-readers who love the Cecily von Ziegesar Gossip Girl series.
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Jeff Bridges to Adapt The Giver
Jeff Bridges is working to adapt Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and production is slated to begin in South Africa this fall. Bridges will play the titular Giver, and Deadline is reporting that Australian unknown Brenton Thwaites will play Jonas.
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The Unwritten Novel
Recently, we featured five writers' reminisces about the novels they ultimately shelved. Here a sixth, Elmo Keep, explains what led her to throw away her first novel, quite outside considerations of craft:"I could not resolve the conflict of a story that was not mine."
Talking History
On the topic of reading classics: Alberto Manguel at the New York Review of Books considers the dialogue across history that books afford. "The relationship between a reader and a book... eliminates the barriers of time and space, like 'conversations with the dead.'"
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On Reviewers, and Paying Them
LA Review of Books editor in chief Tom Lutz has written about the future of book reviews and "a missing generation of journalists."
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Patron-Driven Acquisition
Librarians might frown on P.D.A. in the library, that is, Public Displays of Affection by canoodling college couples. But another kind of P.D.A. might bring a different, more welcome sort of disruption to the library: Patron-Driven Acquisition, a model of e-book licensing that aims to relieve library purchasing agents from spending thousands on books nobody will end up reading.
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