What if the next crisis to hit the headlines brings an end to the world as we know it? It’s a mind-bending thing to contemplate, but it’s what our own Emily St. John Mandel tackles in Station Eleven, which made it up to the final five of last year’s National Book Awards. On a new episode of The Takeaway, Emily talks about the novel, exploring what’s left when civilization withers away. You could also read our interview with Emily about the book.
Wrapping Things Up
Book Picker Book Picker Pick Me A Book
It's time for NPR's Book Concierge again! The interactive site will help you sort the year's releases by about a gazillion criteria, including "book club ideas" and the seriously great "seriously great writing."
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Wodehouse Revival
P. G. Wodehouse is enjoying a popular revival thanks in part to W. W. Norton re-releasing some of his books with nice, attention-grabbing covers. Of course the British author has long had his supporters. Among them? George Orwell. Elsewhere, The Guardian compares Wodehouse's correspondence to Ernest Hemingway's.
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The Book Was Better
The Book Was Better is a podcast that “debates, discusses, and rips into the (often) hastily written and terrible book-of-the-film” adaptations for movies like Wild, Wild West, Hackers, The Net, and (try not to be upset by this one…) Jumanji. (Those episodes can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.)
Animals!
Today in things you might like to read about animals: Some birds, apparently, not only mourn their dead but even hold funeral services. And while it's widely known that the internet is made of cats, Wired dug a little deeper and tried to uncover the root of our collective feline fixation.
Art and Gentrification
“Can art, so often used by developers to mask the violence of displacement, instead be used to resist gentrification?” The New Inquiry reviews Streetopia, a collection of essays edited by Eric Lyle. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on gentrification in New York City.
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Everybody Kafkas
It’s hard work writing Kafka stories appropriate for children, but a guy named Matthue Roth is willing to do it.
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Dylan Thomas, Rediscovered
A poem by Dylan Thomas, “A Dream of Winter,” has been rediscovered after 70 years. Celyn Jones, who acted as Thomas in Set Fire to the Stars, will perform the poem in London tomorrow. We wrote about the the power of reading poetry aloud and how it connects us to the dead.
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