“AYN: This house was built in 1835 but, as you can see, the antiquated design elements suggest the work of a second-rate architect in love with the past who never had an original thought in his wasted life.” Go check out the newest episode of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist House Hunters at McSweeney’s.
The Realities of a Tiny House
Pynchon Angst
Sam Anderson hates Thomas Pynchon.
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2 1/2 Football Fields of Books
After winning The International Design Association's 2012 Library Interior Design Competition, MS&R won funding to convert an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas into a sprawling 124,500 square foot library. McAllen now home to the United States' largest single-story library.
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On Children’s Lit
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The HemingWAY
James Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat for The New York Review of Books. Relatedly, Helena Price has been using 1000memories to compile "memory pages" to "explore the life of Ernest Hemingway as well as his friends and family." Of particular note is this poster imploring us to "Live the HemingWAY." Also related, The Paris Review shares a letter from Papa to his sister Ursala Hemingway.
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The Vonnegut Review
As summer rolls around, you might way to get acquainted with The Vonnegut Review. Conceived by Wilson Taylor and Matthew Gannon, the review will function as a season-long project “dedicated toward reading and reviewing all fourteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.” You can participate with the Review’s Twitter and Tumblr posts by utilizing the hashtag “#VonnegutSummer.”
Of Man’s First Disobedience
Simon DeDeo writes for AGNI about the first line of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s first disobedience. As he explains it, “The line is a syllable too much. In Milton’s blank verse epic—iambic pentameter, five sets of two-syllable feet—the opening has eleven syllables, not ten.”
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The Applicant
"'Poetry, I feel," said Sylvia Plath in a radio interview in 1962, the year before her suicide, 'is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space, you've got to burn away all the peripherals.'" Fifty years after her death, an argument for close reading.