Did Virginia Woolf learn a bit of her modernism from Edith Wharton? John Colapinto argues so in The New Yorker, pointing out that the famous middle section of To the Lighthouse seems to mirror the innovative end of The Age of Innocence.
From Wharton to Woolf
Not Exactly a Science
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reads an essay in Biographia Literaria, a book by Samuel Coleridge now available for free in the Kindle store.
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Rumpus Book Club Action
At The Rumpus, a long group interview/discussion with John Brandon, author of Citrus County. It's all part of The Rumpus Book Club
Post-Maidan
Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
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Into Her Own
Hollywood Notebook by Wendy Ortiz is both a book of poetry and a memoir. Composed of several prose poems, the book depicts her evolution into a poet in her early thirties, following up where her previous memoir Excavation left off. At The Rumpus, Lesley Heiser analyses the book, with references to Phil Klay’s Redeployment and Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf.
Rare Manuscripts on Trial
A few rare stolen manuscripts from the New York Public Library have been the subject of a court case. Melville House covers the progression of the case so far. Travis McDade writes about rare book crime capers in the recent past for The Millions.
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Untangle the Knot
Over at The New York Times, Citizen author Claudia Rankine reviews Teju Cole’s new essay collection. As she puts it, “Cole attempts to untangle the knot of who or what belongs to us and to whom or what do we belong as artists, thinkers and, finally, human beings.” Pair with this Millions interview with Cole.
Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ - a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications.”
2015 Tournament of Books Winner Announced
After five rounds, sixteen books and more hard choices than we can count, The Morning News has chosen this year's champion of the Tournament of Books. Who won, you ask? (Here's a hint: we're pretty happy about it.)
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