Recommended Reading: This review of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir over at Slate. For a bit on Karr and some other Catholic writers with whom she is often associated, here’s an essay from The Millions.
The Heyday of Memoir
Pride and Fiscal Prudence
According to the BBC, Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the Bank of England’s new £10 notes.
Harry Potter and the Teflon Cloak
We’ve been jealous of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak since The Sorcerer’s Stone. Now scientists can make an invisibility cloak in 15 minutes with Teflon. We’ll never get our Hogwarts acceptance letter, but this is pretty close.
Smile!
“Publishing is also an industry that selectively values a kind of swaggering authenticity that would never capitulate to demands for something so banal as being nice. But authenticity is too often a short hand for callous, aloof, or honest for the purpose of cruelty rather than truth-seeking.” Alana Massey writes about the “niceness” of publishing.
Tuesday New Release Day: Koch; Shin; Henríquez, Foulds, Walsh, O’Neill; Dybek
New this week: Summer House With Swimming Pool by Hermann Koch; I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin; The Book of Unknown Americans by Year in Reading alum Cristina Henríquez; In the Wolf’s Mouth by Adam Foulds; The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh; The Girl Who was Saturday Night by Helen O’Neill; and two new books, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots, by Stuart Dybek.
R.O.U.S.
Meet the Bosavi woolly rat, a new breed of giant rat recently discovered in the forests of Papua New Guinea. Weighing in at over three pounds and measuring more than three feet long, it’s thought to be the largest known species of rat on the planet.
Most Epic
This week in book-related infographics: an “Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips.”
Terrible Beauty
Nobody needs reminding that Yeats was a major poet, but it can be easy to forget, a hundred years of his major work, just why his poetry has endured. In The Irish Times, Denis O’Donoghue makes a forceful case for Yeats’s relevance, arguing that “Yeats solved, or came closer than any other modern poet in English to solving, the problem that defeated so many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the claims of common speech, morally responsible, with the insisted-on autonomy of the poem.”