This week in book-related infographics: a look at the deaths and murders in Shakespeare‘s works. Our favorite illustration? The pies that once were Chiron and Demetrius (from Titus Andronicus).
Infographic: Shakespeare, Murder, and Pies
Making It
China plans to spend millions “sprucing up” Gaomi, the hometown of recent Nobel winner Mo Yan.
Flying Mice
Seemingly from the realm of science fiction comes a recent announcement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Scientists there have succeeded in levitating mice.
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Zeitgeist-y
“We get the book adaptations we deserve… We need to re-tell these stories over and over because each generation sees them in a different way, needs different things from them. We tell these stories again and again, their survival over time proof of their intrinsic value. People are writing new Zeitgeist-y things all the time of course, but we return to classics because the stories have endured for a reason.” Sky Friedlander on the “Literary Period Piece.”
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Fail Again
Having kicked off his career with a book of poetry, it’s not surprising that Ben Lerner is interested in the late Johns Hopkins professor Allen Grossman, who theorized that people dislike poetry because poems are — by definition — failures. In a piece for the LRB, he runs through the implications of Grossman’s theory, touching on poets as disparate as Shakespeare and William McGonagall. Pair with Kate Angus on why Americans don’t buy poetry books.
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Reading’s Benefits
This week in book-related infographics: Electric Literature takes a look at all the benefits of reading, from stress reduction to generally becoming a better person.
Dreamweaver
For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.
A New History of the Essay
“You might say we are awash in definitions of the essay and essays themselves, or to mis-paraphrase Wallace Stevens, ideas about the thing as well as the thing itself.” On The Making of the American Essay, the third and final volume of John D’Agata’s A New History of the Essay.