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
The Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County
All of Faulkner's characters exist in the same county, so they probably ran into each other. What if there were a Real Housewives of Yoknapatawpha County? Nathan Pensky humorously imagines the feuds between As I Lay Dying's Addie Bundren and the protagonist of "A Rose for Emily" among others at McSweeney's.
“Notre Dame is a polarizing place.”
With apologies to Mary McCarthy, our own Bill Morris has revisited memories of his sports-crazed Catholic boyhood in Sunday's New York Times --- specifically why he has been a life-long hater of Notre Dame football.
100 Notable Disappointments
I'm relieved to see I've actually read some of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2011. But Rumpus writer Roxane Gay, is pretty disappointed.
Magical Listening
At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion's Salvador and finds that it remains "immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror."
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Reading from the Man Booker Shortlist
We recently announced the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. At Granta, you can read an excerpt from Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, included on the list.
DeWitt Talks Lightning Rods
Recommended Weekend Podcast: Helen DeWitt talks with Anne Strainchamps about her novel Lightning Rods, which we at The Millions loved a lot.
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