A striking photo of the Brontё sisters is not, in fact, a photo of the Brontё sisters. The women in the photo look a lot like them, but their hometown didn’t have much in the way of photography in the 1840s, and there isn’t any record of the Brontёs getting their photo taken. So how did the picture become known for being something it isn’t? At the LRB’s blog, Alice Spawls explains why. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki on Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.
False Negative
Chicago’s Conscience
“If Gwendolyn Brooks wrote fiction, we’d say she was brilliant at world-building–but the world she builds is the real one, the part that didn’t used to make it into the pages of literary magazines.” On the continued relevance of Brooks’s poetry in the context of racial violence in Chicago. Pair with a piece on the power of reading poetry aloud.
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Gentleman Seeking a Lady in Glasses
Are you a guy with good taste in frames and fiction? Then come to the next I Like Your Glasses: Literary Speed Dating. CoverSpy and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe will be hosting the event on February 12 at the store. Tickets are $15 (including a free drink), but gents can get their tickets for $12 if they use the promotional code “QUEEQUEG.” To see what you’re in for, read our essay on attending the first I Like Your Glasses.
Douglas Coupland on the Perils of the Near-Future
“People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s.” Novelist Douglas Coupland (who popularized the term “Generation X”) previews his lecture “A radical pessimist’s guide to the next ten years” in the Globe and Mail.
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Our Lucrative Profession
The folks at Harper’s Bazaar (not Harper’s Magazine) are launching a new short story competition, and the grand prize is wild: an all-expenses-paid weeklong stay on a private Scottish island, publication in the May 2014 issue of the magazine and a first-edition book from the Asprey’s Fine and Rare Books Department, worth up to £3,000. (And yes, that’s pounds, not dollars.)
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The Electric Typewriter Two-fer: Tom Wolfe and Susan Orlean
The folks at The Electric Typewriter have struck again, this time offering fifteen classic reads from Tom Wolfe and twenty more from Susan Orlean.
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“It’s a process that doesn’t stop.”
An in depth interview with Chris Andrews on the subject of translating Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.