From Nebuchadnezzar to Hippocrates to the Victorian asylum: The Paris Review takes a look at mental illness and its treatments across the centuries.
“Madness and Meaning”
Lorrie Commodore
Lorrie Moore is headed to Nashville, Tennessee as Vanderbilt University’s new Gertrude Conaway Professor of English. That sound you just heard is the excited shriek of every Commodore English major yelling out in ecstasy.
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Digital Publishing and Changes to Copy
“Just as the written word changed the spoken word and the printed word changed the written word, so too will the digital word change the printed word, supplementing but not replacing the earlier forms of information technology.”
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Allan Seager’s Place in the Canon
John Warner‘s great uncle Allan Seager wrote a short story “etched permanently into the American consciousness in a way even Hemingway can’t match.” In this marvelous essay, Warner investigates the writer’s inspiration and legacy.
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Waywords and Meansigns
Recommended listening: Waywords and Meansigns, a new project that’s set out to record Finnegans Wake in its entirety and set it to music. The complete work will be released on May 4th, but there are already a few samples available online.
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“Only two people?”
In 1862, Fyodor Dostoevsky met Charles Dickens… Or did he? In a thoroughly researched piece for the Times Literary Supplement, Eric Naiman tells the thrilling story of how one – or two? or several? – hoaxers managed to dupe biographers, New York Times reviewers, London Review of Books editors as well as readers of numerous scholarly publications. Long story short: be wary of ostentatious “nipple” references.
Fine Editions
We’ve seen a proliferation of junky editions of out-of-copyright classics, but we’ve also noted gorgeous new hardcovers from Penguin and now from much smaller outfit White’s Books, including Emma, Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books, and several others.
The Formative Years
Over at the Literary Hub, twelve writers reflect on the high school English teachers who changed their lives. Also check out Nick Ripatrazone’s piece of advice for English teachers.
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A Visual Mind
To get a full sense of the legacy of William Blake, you need to see his paintings alongside his famous poems. The Wordsworth contemporary did much of his best work — including the covers of his own collections — with a brush. At the New York Review of Books blog, Jenny Uglow pays a visit to a new exhibition at Oxford.