“The day is spent for the most part in a glorious solitude. Like the hunter who moves silently through the woods to check his traps, she moves through the library, cautiously avoiding those whom she knows. A single conversation would ruin the beauty and vastness of her silence. Today no such conversation occurs and she is happy.” Good luck not reading this narration of a graduate student’s life in the voice of director Werner Herzog, now. Here’s a great Herzog Millions piece, as well.
Into the Abyss
The Shakespeare Oxford Society
Unsurprisingly, the Oxfordian theory-inspired blockbuster Anonymous is ruffling some feathers in college English departments. The “Shakespeare Oxford Society,” of course, has a rejoinder.
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the Rhythms of Grief
Rachel Eliza Griffiths describes the challenges she faced writing her new book of poetry, Seeing the Body, an examination of grief, art, and remembrance.
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Meghan O’Rourke on Anne Carson’s Nox
At The New Yorker, Meghan O’Rourke lyrically reviews Anne Carson’s latest work Nox: “Grief is paradoxical … The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace is mainly in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace and also, This has been going on a long time.”
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On people braver than us:
Erika Anderson recites her teenage poetry at readings and shares her reasoning for doing so. “I want to live where irony meets kindness, where daring meets bullshit, where everything that failed meets the hope that something might not. I hope my readers do too.”
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Fine Editions
We’ve seen a proliferation of junky editions of out-of-copyright classics, but we’ve also noted gorgeous new hardcovers from Penguin and now from much smaller outfit White’s Books, including Emma, Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books, and several others.
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How To Be A Woman (For Less)
(American) Readers who dug Rob Delaney’s Year In Reading post will be pleased to learn that the eBook of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman is on sale for the low, low price of $1.99. (Along with nine other memoirs, too!)
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The Birth of the Ellipsis
A Cambridge professor has identified the earliest use of the ellipsis in English literature. Find out more at The Guardian. Sam Anderson reminds us that ellipses are good in moderation through an examination of Dan Brown’s Inferno.