“Rather than showing one isolated capsule, the new hall would encompass nature and the human world…. The central theme would not be a certain animal, or even the landscape portrayed. Not one story but the fact that the stories are there. Albert E. Parr, strongly influenced by the burgeoning field of ecology, believed that the interconnectedness between disciplines was the story of the world.” Jaime Green writes for Longreads about the narratives behind the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. Also check out our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
Museum of Natural History
There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
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Reading Rooster
There are plenty of reading apps out there, but a company called Rooster has released another, this one designed to “allow users to consume bite-sized pieces of highly curated fiction” whenever they have a few spare moments. In an interview with BookBusiness, Yael Goldstein Love, the editorial director of the project, described Rooster as aiming “to bring immersive reading, particularly fiction reading, back into busy peoples’ lives.” It’s difficult to know how to feel about this. Of course we think busy people should read good fiction, but is this just a precursor to the inevitable change of literature in the face of growing technology and shortened attention spans?
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Lynda Barry on the Painted Novel
“I came back to my studio and tried to think of the slowest possible way to write a novel, and the slowest way is with frosting.” The Paris Review interviews cartoonist Lynda Barry about writing novels with a paintbrush.
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Telling the Truth
“There is no such thing as a true story. I know this because my daughter insists I told her to put her dirty dishes in the sink when I know I told her to put them in the dishwasher.” Over at The Rumpus, Ellen Urbani writes about telling the truth.
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Literary Doppelgängers Through the Ages
Laurence Scott recounts the best books featuring doppelgängers, from Shakespeare to Agatha Christie to Philip Roth to Joanna Kavenna.
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Peter Carey Point-Counterpoint
Contrasting takes on Peter Carey‘s Parrot & Olivier in America, from Open Letters Monthly and…er, The Onion.