Over at Vulture, twenty-eight authors including Alexander Chee, Margo Jefferson, Colum McCann, and Eileen Myles write about the books that changed their lives. Pair with our article in which six authors reflect on their childhood reading.
Essential Reading
A Drawn Out Illustration
Twelve days after Gustave Flaubert died, a friend cataloged the writer’s personal effects. 48,311 days later, Joanna Neborsky illustrated them.
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The Pioneer Detectives in San Francisco
The Pioneer Detectives is coming to San Francisco! Join author Konstantin Kakaes and Gelf Magazine editor David Goldenberg at The Knockout in the Mission, Tuesday, September 17 at 6.30.
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Resurrecting Dylan Thomas
The Welsh government is hoping that Dylan Thomas can do for Swansea what James Joyce has done for Dublin. This year, officials have announced that £750,000 will be made available for the DT 100 Festival, which will celebrate the centennial of the poet’s birth. Aside from boosting tourism, however, the festival’s organizers also hope to “raise the status of Thomas,” who many feel has “[been] neglected [and had] his work … overshadowed by a conception of the man as a drunkard, scrounger and womaniser.”
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Huxley’s Closes His Doors of Perception
Doors of Perception author Aldous Huxley requested a dose of LSD as he succumbed to laryngeal cancer in 1963. Three weeks later, Huxley’s widow, Laura Archera, wrote a letter describing the experience (“the most beautiful death”) to her brother-in-law. Today the prescription of psychedelic drugs to terminally ill patients is less uncommon than you might expect.
A Transformative Translation
Zachary Lazar talks to Mary Jo Bang about her radical translation of Dante’s Inferno: in an attempt to render the shock Dante caused by writing in conversational Italian rather than the conventional Latin, Bang translated Dante’s text in modern-day English adorned with references to American pop culture. A sample of the text is available online.
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The Shame King
A couple weeks ago, our own Janet Potter reviewed Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a new book which examines the rise of public shaming on social media. In the Times, Ronson takes part in the paper’s By the Book series, several entries of which we’ve written about before. Among other things, he recommends The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Violence by James Gilligan.
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