Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the jingle-man.” Henry James called his work “decidedly primitive.” Yet Edgar Allan Poe, nearly two centuries after his death, is now acclaimed as a writer on par with his best contemporaries. How did his reputation evolve? In the Times Literary Supplement, Marjorie Perloff reviews a new study of Poe by Jerome McGann.
The Craven
Oh, you were the best of all my days.
Zadie Smith reading Frank O’Hara’s “Animals,” by way of the Chicago based ad and design agency, Coudal Partners, and their voice mail based poetry project, Verse by Voice.
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Pick and Choose
Tim Waterstone (of the giant UK chain Waterstones) will soon launch a new platform that publishes shorter works. (Like several other companies, it’s been dubbed “the Spotify of books.”)
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J.R.R. Tolkien Traced “Morse” to “Walrus”
Jonathan Dent offers a fascinating look at one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most challenging assignments for the Oxford English Dictionary. Apparently as a young philologist, Tolkien was tasked with tracing the etymology of “walrus” – a tricky word “of disputed origin that had all but entirely replaced the earlier English name morse since its first appearance in English in the late 1600s.”
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The Flying Dutchmen
This Sunday, the Netherlands will take on Mexico in the second stage of the 2014 World Cup. To explain what makes the Dutchmen so formidable on the soccer pitch, Rowan Ricardo Phillips takes a look at the many “Shades of Oranje.”
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Thank You Millions Readers
A word we head into the holiday season: Thank you readers of The Millions for your thoughtful engagement with the site, and especially those of you who have generously supported our efforts. Happy Thanksgiving!
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Striking New Book Covers
The cover art for some highly anticipated forthcoming novels has been unveiled. Both C by Tom McCarthy and Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis are sporting eye-catching designs.
New Takes on Proust
Add this to the roster of great literary takedowns. Apparently Evelyn Waugh once wrote the following about Proust: “Nobody told me he was a mental defective. He had no sense of time.” (This stands in stark contrast with the views of Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote in a recent Year in Reading piece that Swann’s Way is “one of those miraculous books that gets better with every re-reading.”)
The E-Reader of Sand (II)
Reif Larsen continues our own Mark O’Connell‘s riff on the Borgesian nature of e-readers.