Recommended Reading: Becca Rothfeld on courtship and gender roles in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature written at the turn of the eleventh century.
Legendary Lovers
“Everything goes and nothing matters.”
Recommended Reading: “When Literature Was Dangerous,” a history of censorship and the development of a culture “in which literature lacks urgency” and, perhaps, significance.
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Boo-gali
“Bengali children’s fiction’s limitless supply of ghost stories is matched by little other than its readers’ appetite for it,” writes Siddharthya Swapan Roy. “Anthologies dedicated to ghostly thrills come out with unfailing regularity and every publishing house that does not wish to upset its child readership pays due respects to ghosts and their stories.”
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Goodbye to King of the Blurbs
Recently, it seemed hard to find a book not blurbed by Gary Shteyngart. He did blurb 150 books in the past decade. Yet now the author has decided to mostly retire from blurbing, he announced in The New Yorker. “Literature can and will go on without my mass blurbing. Perhaps it may even improve.” Pair with: Our own Bill Morris’s essay on whether or not to blurb.
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Gibson Girl
“By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.” Edna Saint Vincent Millay, trendsetter.
Jacobs’s Centennial
Yesterday, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, would have turned 100. Some used the anniversary to commemorate her life and others argued that we need to stop deifying her.
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Happy 110th Bloomsday! (2/2)
In honor of Bloomsday, some recommended reading, listening, and playing: one-day diaries of four modern Blooms in New York, Radio Bloomsday’s seven hours of readings (by Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, and others), even found poetry and an iPhone game drawn from the text of Ulysses. Oh, and–of course–James Joyce’s book itself.
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