Recommended Reading: Peter Fulham on William Styron’s Darkness Visible.
No Light Before
Geoff Dyer on Pagetti’s Syria
The devastating images of Syria shot by Franco Pagetti have been collected into a series entitled Veiled Aleppo. Over at The New Republic, Geoff Dyer writes about one of them. It’s an image, Dyer observes, that features “symbols … of the death throes not of a city but of film.”
Interview with Gary Shteyngart
The Rumpus posts an amusing interview with Super Sad True Love Story author Gary Shteyngart: “You have a twenty-five-inch TV and eight million books. What are you, an idiot?”
A Less Dangerous Game
“He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided later, lying in his bed, after they had played several rounds of various games, and didn’t hunt one another at all.” You probably encountered Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game at some point during your educational career — you definitely never came across this “comforting and anodyne” version, though.
Facebook’s Most Popular Titles
We’ve mentioned the “What books have stayed with you?” social media trend before, and now Facebook has tallied up the most popular titles by country. The results are both exactly what you would expect – The Little Prince ranks high in France, One Hundred Years of Solitude fairs well in Latin America – and a little surprising as the Harry Potter series tops the list in countries ranging from India to Italy to Brazil.