“It’s part of Jane Austen’s genius that she can bring the maximum of drama and momentousness to the most minimal of occasions.” Here is David Denby from The New Yorker on reading (and listening to) Austen’s Emma, which is celebrating its two-hundredth year in print. We’ve brought you a bunch of bits on Austen in the past.
For Jane, Forever Ago
The Cheryl Strayed Trend
Call it the Eat, Pray, Love effect for the nature lover. Cheryl Strayed fans are hiking the Pacific Crest Trail after being inspired by Wild. Strayed says she's received more than 1,000 emails from people ready to lace up their hiking boots, but a trail information specialist says he's only seen six women make the full trek.
Book Preservation
Recommended Reading: On the process of bringing old books back to life.
●
●
Moonstruck
Margaret Wise Brown was nothing if not an interesting figure. The Goodnight Moon author, whose life is the subject of a new biography, loved hunting, partying and staging stunts, among them founding a club that claimed they could reschedule Christmas. She kept homes in Greenwich Village and a tiny island off Maine. At Slate, Laura Miller reads the new book by Amy Gary. You could also read our own Jacob Lambert's critical review of kid's picture books.
●
●
Strange Bedfellows Department: Glenn Beck and The French Insurrectionists
You may have heard that Glenn Beck, sower of anxiety about Obamanomics, is also a shill for gold coin dealer Goldline. But here's a conspiracy theory for you: Does Glenn Beck also have a stake in the modish French theoretical organ Semiotext(e)? The truth is out there, people.
Tuesday New Release Day: DFW, Auster, LaCava, Lewis
Both Flesh and Not, a posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace essays, is now out in paperback. Also out: Report from the Interior by Paul Auster; a new paperback edition of Stephanie LaCava's An Extraordinary Theory of Objects; and a new collection of essays by C.S. Lewis. For more on these and other great titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
●
●
After the last word
This weekend--at 2:30 am on Saturday, to be precise--Twitter bot @everyword was set to complete its 7-year run with the final word in the English language: "zymurgy." Unexpectedly, the bot tweeted again half an hour later--with a nontraditional character it had surreptitiously glossed on the first run: éclair. Since @everyword, like Lazarus, probably won't get the same fuss after its second death, check out The Guardian's interview with creator Adam Parrish now.
Maybe Now You Can Understand It.
Artist John Vernon Lord drew inspiration from Irish literature’s “books of the dark” to adapt James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into a series of illustrated images. Over at The Guardian, Lord discusses how he developed some of his pages.