Georgy Manaev investigates the pen names of famous Russian writers, from Maxim Gorky to Chekhov. Pair with this Millions piece on literary names that are hard to pronounce.
Masters of Names
Kindle Wins Christmas?
Amazon announced that on Christmas day it sold more Kindle ebooks than regular books (and that the Kindle is not the site’s most popular gift ever). Chadwick Matlin outlines at The Big Money the reasons why the Christmas day surge in ebook sales don’t matter. The New York Times suggests each new version of the Kindle may be getting worse, and separately dubs 2010 the “Year of the Tablet.”
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Quite the Crossover Artist
Before Dr. Seuss penned the Lorax who spoke for the trees, he drew ads for Standard Oil, General Electric, and a host of other large corporations who spoke for a considerably different constituency. This great collection of advertising artwork from Theodore Seuss Geisel courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.
In Other Words, All of America
Would you prefer to live in a city designed around parking, or a city designed around food?
Adaptation Progress Report
This week in book-to-film adaptations: Meredith Goldstein rounds up some possible and upcoming projects for The Boston Globe, including adaptations of The Goldfinch (which we cast here) and our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s Station Eleven.
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“describe this flight / and not add a last line.”
“All poems of public grief are private poems first,” writes Mark Doty in his evaluation of Wisława Szymborska’s poem, “Photograph from September 11th.” Indeed, what Doty learned “over the course of those dozen years, was that the words one hammers out in private, in order to attempt some kind of sense, may end up being used by people in ways you could have never anticipated.”
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