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
Stories in Space
Recommended Reading: On new posters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and space travel’s place in storytelling. Dominic Smith asks why there aren’t more stories in space.
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RIP E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow, the renowned novelist and fiction writer best known for books including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and the National Book Award-winning World’s Fair, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 84. You could read one of our numerous pieces about his work if you’d like to look back on his life and career.
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Drunk Texts From Famous Authors (Part II)
A year and a half later, Jessie Gaynor returns to The Paris Review to follow up her much-appreciated “Drunk Texts From Famous Authors” series. (Part one is here.) On tap this time: T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, Jorge Luis Borges, Guillaume Apollinaire, William Blake, and a Flarf poet.
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What It Was Like, Down South
You may have read Darcey Steinke’s Year in Reading piece, or perhaps one of her articles here at The Millions. Or else you might have read — or at least heard about — her recent novel, Sister Golden Hair. Either way, you should read this interview at The Rumpus, in which she talks about Virginia, femininity and books that have too much plot.
Dr. Seuss’s Other Jobs
Did you know Dr. Seuss penned a lesser-known book of nudes? Or about his advertising work? (Hopefully you’re not at work today.)
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“Linguistic loot”
Recommended Reading: Kate Manning on the “slumgullions” of English.
“Intellectual Terrorist”
If last year’s The Marriage Plot was too brief a taste of semiotics for you, here’s an interesting essay on Jacques Derrida, “the Samson to tear down the temple of structuralism,” and his seminal 1966 American presentation on “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences.”
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