Recommended viewing: Kafka‘s “A Country Doctor” translated into Japanese animation.
A Japanese Country Doctor
Great to Not Great
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
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Reading E-Readers
The publishing industry is changing quickly, and Jellybooks is helping it happen. The company gives out free e-books to readers in exchange for their consent to track their reading habits. This data goes back to publishers to be used in the market. Our own Nick Moran asks if e-readers are as green as we think.
‘There is no sincerer love than the love of food’ – Shaw
Lapham's Quarterly has released their Summer 2011 issue. Its topic? Food. They've even compiled the issue's entire bibliography in case you're interested.
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“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
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Tuesday New Release Day: Toynton, Morrison
New this week is Evelyn Toynton's The Oriental Wife, a novel of Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany, landed in New York. Also out is Grant Morrison's Supergods, a scholarly exploration of comic book superheroes.
First Lines of the New Jonathan Franzen
I'd heard that the New Yorker excerpt was the opening of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom, but it turns out it is preceded in the novel by this: "The news about Walter Berglund wasn't picked up locally--he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now--but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in Washington. His old neighbors had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times ('arrogant,' 'high-handed,' 'ethically compromised') with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedaling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds."
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Another Perspective
“I believe that just as much as teens fear time, adults do as well. It would be selfish of us to think that they can understand and accept our evolution into adulthood much easier than we can. Maybe in reality, teenagers and parents are scared of the same things.” The LARB runs a 15-year-old reader's honest review of The Fault in Our Stars.
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