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
Book bits – Sherlock, the Unbearable Dave Matthews, Renaming Google Print
Stanford “will rerelease a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine.”Maciej Ceglowski suggests that Milan Kundera “is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who’s paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless.” And offers up a number of Eastern European books that young lovers might give to one another instead of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.Google Print has been renamed Google Book Search. “Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit — which of course it won’t.”
Tuesday is New Release Time
A good week for new releases: John McPhee’s new, more personal collection of essays, Silk Parachute, Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and, of course, our own Sonya Chung’s debut Long for This World. All three of these books were on our “Most Anticipated” list for 2010. New in paperback today is Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn.
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I’m Not Excited
The “Albums of Our Lives” series over at The Rumpus is a consistent source of entertaining essays. This week’s contribution, which focuses on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, is no aberration.
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus’s short story “Leaving the Sea” in the current issue of Tin House.
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Catlin Seaview Survey
One of my favorite Google Easter Eggs was the (now removed) instruction to “swim across the Atlantic Ocean” in order to get from New York to London. Today, however, that joke seems prophetic. Google, in conjunction with The University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, has created the Catlin Seaview Survey or, in other words, “an underwater variant of the Google Street View service.”
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William Gibson’s Zero History
The New York Times reviews William Gibson’s new novel Zero History: “To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future…” Also: Douglas Gorney interviews Gibson for the Atlantic.
Careless Drivers
Can’t keep track of who is driving which car in The Great Gatsby? Pop Chart Lab made a chart of the comings and goings of the novel’s characters via trains, cars, and feet.
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