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
It’s Not TV. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Deadline reports that Hunger Games screenwriter Billy Ray has plans to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald's final, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, into a series for HBO.
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The People Hath Spoken
Is it possible to figure out Shakespeare's politics from his plays? At the very least, there's a lot we can learn.
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Two Tools for your TBR Pile
One Goodreads vigilante has created a master list of authors notorious for responding immaturely or meanly to negative reviews of their work. Elsewhere, iDreamBooks, a new Rotten Tomatoes-type service, was launched. The site aggregates critics’ book reviews and shows you what to read next.
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Dancing Feet
Fred didn't always have Ginger: The Boston Review looks at the many dance partners of Fred Astaire, as catalogued by Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced With Fred Astaire and The Astaires: Fred and Adele.
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
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Skirmishing With the Eminati
Look out, Darwin -- Wolfe's coming for you. Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which we reviewed a couple of days ago, takes aim at Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky: "Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine."
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The Deletionist
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
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