A first edition of Don Quixote, fragments of Sappho, and a lock of Percy Shelley‘s hair all in one place: Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries.
Bodleian Treasures
Burning Stephenie Meyer
While millions of teenage girls and grown women (see the Twilight Moms blog if you don’t believe me) wait with bated breath for the November 20th premier of New Moon (see the preview here), the film version of the second installment of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight series, some less satisfied readers are making movies of their own–movies in which they beat, burn, and otherwise insult copies of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. See Burn, Twilight, Burn!, Twilight Burning, with Techno, The Twilight Chainsaw Massacre, Twilight Baseball. And that’s only for starters. I also like this one, Twilight Burning Party, in which two spunky Ghost World-y young ladies, Cassi and Angel, do a little stand-up literary critique before burning the book.
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Rule No. 8: Is secret.
Colson Whitehead offers eleven simple writing rules. Also check out our review of Whitehead’s most recent novel, Zone One.
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The Black Woman Writer
“Women writers and writers of color don’t really have the luxury of being known simply as writers. There’s always a qualification,” Roxane Gay writes for The Nation. She ponders what it means to be a “black woman writer” and concludes that we should view diversity as a search for “urgent, unheard stories.”
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A Conservative Estimate
While makers of the graph admit that it’s no substitute for a real poll, according to a heatmap of political books purchased on Amazon in the United States, conservative books are more popular than their left-wing rivals. Another heatmap of note: a firm tracked the use of the F-bomb on twitter over the course of a day to see where America’s foulest mouths are concentrated.
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Step Aside Shakes
Hold on to your starched collars: In breaking Shakespeare news, Oxford University Press announced that in its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe will receive credit as co-author on the Henriad plays. And if you’re really tired of Will getting all the credit, you’ll enjoy our recent piece about the surge of interest in Ben Jonson, who’s basically the Third Tenor to their more famous voices.
“Pointless and trivial.”
“Where, more importantly, is the story? David simply is. He does nothing, desires nothing. He exists, if that, and nothing more.” Shalom Auslander judges the prestigious Three Under Three prize.
Haruki Murakami: Literary Ambassador
Among Haruki Murakami’s many significant literary achievements is the fact that the author has – since the 1990s – become “responsible for triggering and fueling the Japanese literature boom in South Korea.” Indeed, by “creat[ing] bonds of shared emotions and literary sensibilities among tens of millions of people with different cultural and historical backgrounds,” writes Yoon Sang-In, “Murakami’s literary works have emerged as a great cultural asset that contributes to stability in [the East Asian] region.” (Bonus: Murakami’s latest book – which will be published in the States in 2014 – is flying off the shelves in Japan.)