When you’re trying to keep up with the best new writers out there, it’s easy to forget the debt we owe to the classics. So let’s go back to the beginning: Why Homer Matters, a new book by Adam Nicholson on the father of all poets, explores the question of who Homer was, and whether or not he was even one person. You could also read Frank Kovarik on the parallels between The Odyssey and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Poet Zero
“In Argentina, it’s better to keep your mouth shut.”
Seven years ago, a stolen copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fervor de Buenos Aires was finally returned to Argentina’s National Library. But was it the same copy that had been taken fifteen years prior?
We’re Going with “Greatest”
“The actress and author of a new children’s book, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, has contemplated throwing the writer Michel Houellebecq across a room.” Great NYT subhead or greatest NYT subhead?
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Showtime Confirms
I reported earlier that Franzen’s Purity was headed to TV with Daniel Craig front and center. Now, Showtime has officially sealed the deal. Production is expected to begin in 2017. Revisit our editor Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book to prepare for the series.
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Wiki-zon
In a long tradition of online experimentation, Amazon has now started including something called “Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Pages” in its internal search results (see the second result here). Now you can view a copy of Wikipedia pages for authors like David Foster Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Franzen, and probably thousands of others. How can Amazon do this? Wikipedia pages are free for anyone to reuse for almost any purpose, so long as the license info is displayed. Why is Amazon doing this? It wants free content that it can monetize.
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The End of the Hemingway Embargo
2,000 recently digitized copies of Ernest Hemingway’s papers will be transferred from Cuba to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library – this will be the first time copies of the papers will be available to U.S. researchers. As of right now, I don’t believe there are any plans to return the urinal Hemingway took from a Key West bar to its proper location in Sloppy Joe’s.
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