You might have heard that a new Shirley Jackson book appeared on shelves this week. A collection of previously unpublished work, Let Me Tell You was published by Penguin Random House, which happens to be the place where Benjamin Dreyer, a lifelong Shirley Jackson fan, works as a copy chief and managing editor. At The Toast, he describes how it felt to edit his favorite writer.
All Told
“Your brain on metaphors”
“What’s emerging from these studies isn’t just a theory of language or of metaphor. It’s a nascent theory of consciousness.” Michael Chorost writes about the importance of metaphors in literature and the brain.
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Curiosities: Three Feet of Paper
Conversational Reading covers “Four Greek Writers That You Should (and Can) Read.”Wells Tower interviewed on The Dinner Party Download.Anne Trubek at Good Magazine recommends our site to “Post-Collegiate Literary Types”The Elegant Variation gets a new reader. Congratulations, Mark!Make of this what you will: “Popular Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki will publish a short novel called Drop on rolls of toilet paper.”Wikipedia Find of the Week I: Criticism of Wikipedia (so meta)Wikipedia Find of the Week II: No one cares about your garage band (so snarky)”Updike’s Sunset:” Kakutani takes on two newly published Updike collections, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories and Endpoint and Other Poems.Further Reading: Consider revisiting our guest post from last week, Finding Indie Opportunity on The Kindle, where a very interesting discussion developed in the comments.
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O, Miami Poetry Festival
Do you live in Miami-Dade County? Do you want to get involved in the region’s burgeoning literature and poetry scene? If so you’ll want to check out the O, Miami Information Session on Wednesday, February 27th. The meeting is meant “to inform local Miami poets of different opportunities for participating in the 2013 O, Miami Poetry Festival.”
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“The contract gave me the last word on spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage and so on.”
If you’ve ever battled an editor over punctuation, or found yourself calculating just how long it’d take to burn your copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, you’ll be delighted by this oldie-but-goodie blog post by Millions favorite Helen DeWitt.
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Text Turns to Artwork
Tom McCormack is midway through a three-part series on internet artwork, but not the kind involving Photoshop and GIFs. After exploring the history and usage of emoticons in part one of his series, McCormack traces the roots of ASCII artwork back to Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1918 book Calligrammes. Stay tuned for the conclusion soon: a look at the history of emoji.
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