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.
The Birth of the Ellipsis
After great Cake – a formal Frosting comes…
We all revere Emily Dickinson‘s poems, but who knew she was also a great baker? Spend your weekend rereading the Dickinson oeuvre, and then top it off by attempting her coconut cake recipe.
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The Différance Between Biography and Life
“Biography, even those of intellectual figures, assumes a general reader, a reader who does not understand or want to understand the ideas of its subject. The biography of a philosopher magnifies this approach, turning its attention simply to the ‘significant events’ in the life of the philosopher.” Derrida: the impossible biography?
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The Book Depository Map
For book voyeurs, the Book Depository has a live, real-time map of people actually buying books from them across the world. (via Guardian’s Book Blog)
Profile of Rick Moody
At the Hartford Advocate, Craig Fehrman talks to Rick Moody about his “perplexing” career and latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death: “Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation, but he is one of the most successful …”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Grossman, Baker, Dyer, Pierre, Wilson, Mukherjee, Grossman
In a big week for new releases, we have Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his blockbuster debut The Magicians; Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, reviewed here today; another new Geoff Dyer book, The Missing of the Somme; DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland; and Kevin Wilson’s debut novel The Family Fang (which one blurber calls The Royal Tenenbaums meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Four of the five books above, incidentally, were featured in our big second-half preview. And out in a paperback this week are a pair of award winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.
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Fiction Contest at Columbia
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art has a fiction, nonfiction and poetry contest going on that pays $500 to first prize winners. Joshua Ferris is judging the fiction entries. Deadline is 1/1/2010.
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