RIP Günter Grass, who passed away in a hospital in Lübeck, Germany this morning at the age of 87. Grass, who won the Nobel in 1999, achieved fame upon publication of his debut novel, The Tin Drum. For more on the author’s life, you can read Ranbir Sadhu’s review of his memoir.
RIP Günter Grass
Woody Allen’s Favorite Books
The ever-irreverent Woody Allen weighs in on his all-time faves, among other things. A Catcher in the Rye unsurprisingly makes the list, as do more obscure picks like The World of SJ Perelman.
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Choose Your Own Apocalypse: Skynet or Stingrays
With the help of Our Final Hour author Martin Rees, Cambridge will soon open a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The Centre will investigate the threats posed by “artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.” To my ears, this sounds an awful lot like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was memorably depicted in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs.”
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A Shared Vernacular
Year in Reading alum David L. Ulin writes about how books forged a bond between him and his father. “Books are, have always been, a shared vernacular between us.”
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D.H. Lawrence on Trial
Ben Yagoda provides a step-by-step recount of the 1959 British obscenity case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and every noted literary name from Graham Greene to Evelyn Waugh to T. S. Eliot who weighed in: “The whole thing was very well stage-managed with a splendid cast.”
My Favorite Movies, Cheap
This just in: Three of my all-time favorite movies are on sale on Amazon for $6.99: Shaun of the Dead, Dazed and Confused, and The Jerk. There’s a bunch of other DVDs on sale too.
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The Rules of Drinking and Writing
Geoff Nicholson of the New York Times compares the rules of drinking and the rules of writing in light of the recent reissue of famous cocktail guide The Hour (with a new introduction by Daniel Handler, otherwise known as Lemony Snicket).
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