Tolstoy has a new book out. No, not that Tolstoy — Sofiya Tolstoy, wife of Leo Nikolayevich. Her long-lost novella, which languished for years in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow, has finally been published, as part of an expanded edition of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata. At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum praises her story, calling it “graceful, emotionally intuitive and heartbreaking.” Related: 8 experts on whether Leo Tolstoy is better than Dostoevsky.
Wifely Pursuits
Bayside High as Playboy Mansion
Parental Guidance Suggested: The 11 Most Scandalous Revelations from Dustin Diamond’s tell-all Saved By The Bell memoir. (I feel kind of ashamed of myself for even posting this, but such is life on the Internet.)
To Have or Have Not
Read our own Edan Lepucki’s great review of Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids? Then you might want to read Vivian Gornick’s complementary take on the book. In Bookforum, she reads Meghan Daum’s anthology as well as Kate Bolick’s Spinster, placing the two in a broader feminist context.
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Cultivating Profit
In an attempt to shift attention away from the ongoing E. coli scandal, Chipotle has announced the next round of authors whose work will be appearing on their cups as part of their ongoing Cultivating Thought series. Look for pieces by Amy Tan, Jeffery Eugenides, Neil Gaiman, and Barbara Kingsolver among five or six others – just be careful of the burritos.
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Celtic Tiger’s Collapse
Gabriel O’Malley‘s “Letter From Dublin” for n+1 is an interesting primer on the current state of Ireland following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
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Reading a Video Game
The modern maestros of fantasy at Bethesda Softworks penned thousands of pages of text for the Elder Scrolls series, scattering 256 detail-packed, in-game books across 2006’s Oblivion, with a commensurate amount in 2002’s Morrowind. Presumably these tomes were consumed by the hardcore few. Did Bethesda spend countless hours of careful word-crafting for a fanatical minority?
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