Check out Maurice Sendak’s illustrations of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales posted on Brain Pickings this April. The illustrations were published with Lore Segal’s translation of the stories in The Juniper Tree: And Other Tales from Grimm. Our own Emily Colette Wilkinson revisits Sendak’s stories as an adult.
Sendak’s Tales
Known Knowns
Literary fame is a knotty thing. It’s hard to predict exactly who will be known for centuries, and why. William Wordsworth, for example, owes at least part of his fame to the Lake District, which started to use him in their tourist campaigns not long after his death. In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman takes a look at H.J. Jackson’s Those Who Write for Immortality. Related: Gina Fattore’s recent essay on fame and money.
The Flying Dutchmen
This Sunday, the Netherlands will take on Mexico in the second stage of the 2014 World Cup. To explain what makes the Dutchmen so formidable on the soccer pitch, Rowan Ricardo Phillips takes a look at the many “Shades of Oranje.”
The Naked Truth About Favorite Poems
Reddit users asked one another to name their all-time favorite poems. Not to be outdone, Poetry Brain asked its Twitter followers to name their all-time favorite poems… to read naked. Since I imagine the latter group is usually only able to read in the buff while at home, I bet they really lament the 2001 demise of Harvard’s “Phone-a-Poem” feature.
“Daytripper is overrun with rich detail”
Dominic Umile takes a look at the Daytripper, a comic by Brazilian brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. The comic, which was selected recently for les Fauves d’Angoulême – the largest comics festival in Europe – concerns the “volley of riches and failure from the desk of an obituary writer.” As Umile notes, the art of obituary writing experienced quite a popularity surge in 2012. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the regularity with which obituaries appeared on A1 in the paper, and the column even warranted the creation of its own dedicated Twitter account.
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“It is not enough to have his idea.”
Recommended Reading: Four poems by Darin Ciccotelli are up at BOMB.
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Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
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