I’ve written before about By Heart, a series at The Atlantic in which authors write short pieces about their favorite passages in literature. This week, our own Edan Lepucki — whose new novel you may have heard about thanks to Stephen Colbert — writes about the metaphors in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (FYI, Margaret Atwood wrote a Year in Reading entry for The Millions.)
Body Language
New Sherlock Holmes Story
The last few weeks have been all about rediscovered works by beloved authors, first Harper Lee‘s upcoming sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, then Dr. Seuss‘s What Pet Should I Get? Now Arthur Conan Doyle joins the trend with a rediscovered Sherlock Holmes short story, available online from Vulture.
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Marco Roth on Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of the upcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, n+1 posts Marco Roth’s compelling review of Ishiguro’s novel and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island online for the first time.
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The First Book Flown to the Moon
Alyssa Lukpat on the tiny book Buzz Aldrin took with him on the history-making voyage to the moon.
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Schmidle’s Challenge
Nicholas Schmidle‘s riveting account of Seal Team Six’s Abbottabad raid was the highlight of this week‘s New Yorker. Yet he wrote the article without interviewing any of the team members. C. Christine Fair explains how he did it.
“The history of sex is also a literary history.”
We knew this day would come. A review of Fifty Shades of Grey appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books. Your move, Robert Silvers.
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus’s short story “Leaving the Sea” in the current issue of Tin House.
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Just Being Honest
Can I be honest with you for a minute here? These colloquially updated Bible passages at The Toast are pretty funny. You could also read a brief history of colloquial titles.
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