Jenn Shapland had the pleasure of cataloguing the archives of Carson McCullers, Gertrude Stein, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Their possessions left her with a few lingering questions. Pair with Shapland’s piece on cataloguing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
Questions from the Archives
This Old House
It's been another long week. Lighten the crush of news with The Guardian's literary quiz, in which you match the house to the writer/book it inspired. And once you've gotten your score, perhaps take a vicarious tour of the House of Brontë?
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War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he'd never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers'. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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HBD EB!
Happy first birthday to Emily Books! The Observer ran a little recap of the book club-slash-store's lascivious first anniversary party, where Kate Zambreno and Tamara Faith Berger both read from their recent novels. Here's the Million's interview with Zambreno, and here's a #LitBeat from one of Berger's previous readings from her steamy wonder of a novel, Maidenhead.
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Grading Died Today
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. Don’t let this dissuade you from revising again and again, which can really improve a piece of writing.” Albert Camus, creative writing instructor.
Darcy the Ripper
As part of the Funny Women feature at The Rumpus, Melissa Darcey wonders: what would it be like if Lifetime made movies out of classic novels?
A Censor’s Tour
Recommended reading: Peter Hessler writes about spending a week on tour with his Chinese censor.
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