It’s fitting that Ray Bradbury credited his interest in architecture to an H.G. Wells story he read when he was five. At The Paris Review Daily, a previously unpublished essay by the author, who says his career in architecture started when he noticed there was no plaque at the residence of Sherlock Holmes. Related: Tanjil Rashid on Bradbury’s connection to the Middle East.
Building Up
Eclipse Archive of Radical Small-Press Writing
Step 1: Read a sentence that says, “Eclipse is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century.” Step 2: Click through and explore the site. Step 3: Look up and realize six hours have passed.
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A Soviet Gollum
This week in beautiful books: Eugène Delacroix once illustrated Goethe’s Faust, and Goethe himself claimed the resulting lithographs “surpassed my own vision.” A full version of the work is now available online. And in a slightly more light-hearted vein, English Russia has found and scanned a delightful Soviet version of The Hobbit, complete with a Gollum straight out of Dr. Seuss.
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Dystopian (Non)Fictions
Alexandra Alter traces how “a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root” in the Middle East following the Arab Spring.
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In the Pope’s Own Words
Over at Asymptote, Oonagh Stransky talks about the transformative experience of translating Pope Francis. As she puts it, “I not only discovered a gentle, deeply human side to this Pope, I felt something change or soften inside me.”
Word comics of the day
Recommended RSS-ing: A better word of the day from artist Tory Hoke, who pairs each unusual word with a hand-drawn comic. Friday’s entry, “spurcitious,” is charmingly defined in relation to a thumb and a hammer. Hate pictures? Other tried-and-true options include curators at Merriam-Webster, The New York Times, and this guy on Twitter.
When A Critic Becomes An Author
Vanity Fair talks to renowned book critic Michiko Kakutani about her debut The Death of Truth and why she decided to become an author.