Recommended reading: a new, previously undiscovered story and accompanying poem by Charlotte Brontë. The story is rife with flogging and embezzlement–all the good stuff! Here’s a bonus piece on how Charlotte is at least partly responsible for the success of the Bronte sisters as a whole.
Thees and Thous
Early Starts
Sick of feeling inadequate compared to your literary peers? Well, you might want to stop reading, then: turns out Adam Thirlwell published his first book when he was three. (The readers of Granta learn this not from Thirlwell, who seems a bit abashed, but instead from Year in Reading alumnus Jeffrey Eugenides.)
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Exploring the 92nd Street Y’s Digital Archive
Audio for over 10,000 events – including concerts, poetry readings, and public interviews – is being made available on the 92nd Street Y’s new digital archive. Among the treasures in the trove are readings by Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, and Susan Sontag. (Thanks Andrew.)
Where Everyone’s a Cardsharp
Edward “The Godfather” Thorp has been widely recognized as the “father of card counting” since the publication of his bestselling book Beat the Dealer in 1962. Today, at 70 years old, the man’s impact on the card game is ubiquitous, but perhaps nowhere moreso than at Las Vegas’ annual Blackjack Ball.
Self-Publishing like a Woolf
“History is littered with poets… who set up their own presses to publish their work, because it was so different from the normal forms of the time. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard are one example- they started their own press called the Hogarth Press (it is still going today) to publish collections of their work.” Self-publishing is something we’ve written about many times before, but Sarah Gonnet raises a good point – self-publishing isn’t truly a new phenomenon, and it does allow for a great deal of creative freedom.
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Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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“A long, rich and lust-filled tradition”
In the Paris of the late 19th century, the courtesan was “an essential part of the pecking order,” writes Heather Hartley at the Tin House blog.
“Never will I tire of that silvery fluidity”
“I hope this prize will incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers’ bodies in all states of array and disarray.” Literary Review calls out the year’s most abominable sex scene.
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Jon Cotner’s Island Night
How’s this sound: an eight-mile midnight stroll through Fire Island, replete with Socratic dialogue and references to Sappho, Pythagoras, Diogenes and Hippocrates? Such is exactly what you get from Island Night, the latest project of poet Jon Cotner (previously mentioned for his We’re Floating and Poem Forest projects). As the poet explains to the NY Times, his mission with the walks was to revive “the ancient and endangered practices of walking and talking.”
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