Elena Ferrante’s introduction to the Folio edition of Sense and Sensibility is available at The Guardian. She describes the experience of reading Jane Austen as a girl. “At the time, I was enthralled by the great male adventure novels, with their stories that ranged all over the world, and I wanted to write such books myself: I couldn’t resign myself to the idea that women’s novels were domestic tales of love and marriage. I was past 20 when I returned to Austen. And from that moment not only did I love everything she had written but I was passionate about her anonymity.”
Secret Identity
Characterizing Sleep
On this date 109 years ago, a cartoonist first paired the letter "Z" to the act of sleeping, beating out other attempts to write out the sound of slumber such as the tenacious "g-r-r-k-k-k-k" and the elegant "z-z-z-c-r-r-k-k-k-k."
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Curiosities
Anne Fernald's two posts about her grandmother's editions of Virginia Woolf are a treat.Gwenda Bond of Shaken and Stirred landed on NPR over the weekend to talk about the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables, in honor of which the Modern Library has put out a new edition.The Oxford Project: "In 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every single resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa." It's a neat sounding photo book, reminiscent of La Porte, Indiana.Under 30? Really good at writing book reviews? You should enter VQR's Young Reviewers Contest.It's an alarm clock that wakes you up with the voice of Stephen Fry in the character of Jeeves. You can listen to all the recordings at the site. An example: "Let us seize the day and take it roughly from behind... as the Colonel used to say in his unfortunate way."
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News That Stays News
“Yes, they believed I was a dangerous person, unpredictable, and I observed that I really scared them. Sometimes I noted that the guards looked at me as judges. Their look translated to me as ‘gorilla, stay in your cage!’ When soldiers were off-duty, they came to gawk at me with a sense of wonder. Sometime they would throw me a piece of meat or something sweet, just like to an animal. The old EZ: an exciting and fascinating sight.” Ezra Pound reflects on his time in an Italian prison.
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