Recommended Reading: Critic James Wood for the New Yorker on one of the most significant literary heroes of the Holocaust, Primo Levi. The three-volume Complete Works of Primo Levi is out this week.
Irony and Equanimity
Do You Have That in Paperback
Cairo bookstore Bab Aldonia has installed a soundproof room for its customers in which, MobyLives reports, “anyone can go and scream in privacy for ten minutes at a time.” An unsigned piece on the online magazine Cairoscene notes that working out one’s frustrations within the safety of its walls “may prove just as effective as regime change.” The stakes are considerably lower, but if you’re a fan of indie booksellers, you’ll also enjoy our piece about bookstores we have known, loved, and worked for.
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Ready, Set, Goals
Octavia Butler did everything she set herself to do in this ambitious to-do list—courtesy of the Butler Archive at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
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Dun-Dun
Planning on writing a prison scene? Worried your characters might sound a bit unrealistic? Then see if you can get your hands on the Bonne Terre dictionary. Written by inmates at a prison in Louisiana, the dictionary includes such idiosyncratic terms as “boat,” meaning a plastic bed, and “pumpkin,” meaning a new inmate.
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Google Map Tourism
Google Maps now allows users to take 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. Here’s Yosemite’s Half Dome, and here’s Trevi Fountain.
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He Just Keeps Going and Going and Going
As the publication date nears for Robert Caro’s latest Lyndon Johnson installment, The Passage of Power, it’s a good idea to brush up on your history of Caro’s career. Enter Charles McGrath and his great portrait of one of the most prolific biographers of all time.
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On the Road with Hurston and Hughes
Yuval Taylor tells the story of a fortuitous road trip, on which Zora Neale Hurston drove Langston Hughes from Mobile to Tuskegee.
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Short Form
“Aphorisms are linguistic memes. They were, in essence, an attempt by Greek philosophers to go viral 2,500 years before the internet existed.” On the form of the aphorism, and Sarah Manguso’s new book.
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