Discovery of the Week: Fairy tales are older than previously thought. Researchers have traced stories back to prehistoric and bronze age times. For example, Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin “can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2,500 and 6,000 years ago.” Kirsty Logan writes about the problem with fairy tales.
Prehistoric Fairy Tales
David Foster Wallace in Coversation
In April, the University Press of Mississippi will add a volume on David Foster Wallace to its Literary Conversations Series. A taste of the interviews contained within can be found at Dalkey.
Change
The New York Review of Books excerpts recent Nobel winner Mo Yan's part fiction, part memoir Change.
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Living Like Fitzgerald
Looking for a new summer home? Something with an impressive literary pedigree? You're in luck! Now you can buy the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gastsby for the low, low price of $3.8 million.
Ryan Gosling San Serif
Font geeks will get a kick out of this witty Tumblr site that mashes up glam shots of Ryan Gosling with lessons on the proper, and improper, uses of many typographical fonts and symbols.
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Stevenson as Kurtz
"Since the middle of the 20th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby—larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane—and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway)." Matthew Pearl asks: was Robert Louis Stevenson the blueprint for Conrad's Kurtz?