“My scant respect for the trade to which I belong (from the most ancient of academicians to the most youthful of libelists) derives from a childhood home in which I grew used to mistreating and misusing almost all the seminal texts from the history of culture.” Javier Marias on the dangers of growing up with too many books.
Too Many Books
You Are What You Buy
This piece by Carrie Murphy is delightful and playful and a couple other “adjective”+fuls all in one.
Sense of an Ending
How do you know when you’re finished writing a novel? Electric Literature’s advice column, The Blunt Instrument, tackles the timeless questions of how to begin and when to end. If it’s endings you’re after, this piece from The Millions on writers and last lines will help give you some closure.
●
●
The OA’s New EIC
Take the opportunities provided by this video and this interview to get to know Roger Hodge, the new editor of The Oxford American.
●
●
●
●
“manuals for a thinking person”
Jed Perl on Susan Sontag’s journals: “The fascination of Sontag’s prose—and its sadness—is in the extent to which she is describing herself as a person who can never really get beyond a schematic kind of thinking and feeling.”
Preview of It Chooses You
To celebrate the printing of Miranda July’s It Chooses You in paperback McSweeney’s is offering a free excerpt from the book. Also see our brief review of It Chooses You and the excellent Onion article wondering what July’s whole “thing” is, anyways.
●
●
The Restoration of “Il Cantilena”
Pietru Caxaro composed “Il Cantilena” in the late 15th century, and his poem is widely considered to be the oldest known literary text in the Maltese language. Recently conservator Theresa Zammit Lupi worked to restore the original manuscript’s paper, binding and cover in order to “bring new life” to the historic work. You can read an approximate English translation of the poem courtesy of Wikipedia.
●
●