“With Your Wings,” a lost Steinbeck story from the 1940’s, has just been published for the first time by literary magazine The Strand.
Lost Steinbeck
A Radical Vision
Recommended reading: this brilliant and thorough profile of Toni Morrison from the New York Times Magazine, complete with a video of Morrison reading from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child.
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“How I Read”
“We all read from different places, different backgrounds, and my meeting with Proust or Woolf, or Lydia Davis or J. M. Coetzee, will not be yours, nor should it be. On the other hand I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption. … [so] there must be techniques and tools that everyone can use or try, even if we use them differently.” Tim Parks explains how he reads for The New York Review of Books.
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Astonishment!!!
The Toast has compiled a list of 18th century book titles and they’re almost funny enough to make us wish people still wrote books like them. Standout titles include Astonishment!!!, The History Of A Dog. Written By Himself, And Published By A Gentleman Of His Acquaintance. Translated From The French., and the mysterious The Polish Bandit; Or, Who Is My Bride?
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Jacobs’s Centennial
Yesterday, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would have turned 100. Some used the anniversary to commemorate her life and others argued that we need to stop deifying her.
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Labyrinths
Recommended recommendations: “Five books that are also labyrinths,” including Italo Calvino‘s The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Lily Hoang‘s Changing.