Recommended Reading: The inimitable Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon.
The Salmon Is Inedible
Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.
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“Life was not cake.”
Melville House has one of the short stories from Tao Lin’s Bed up for your noontime reading pleasure.
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Excerpted
From the book I’m reading right now: “My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood.”
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Martin Amis on Philip Larkin’s Love Letters
“Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the ‘literary correspondence’ is something we’re well shot of – a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets.” Martin Amis reviews the recent collection of Philip Larkin’s love letters, Letters to Monica, at Guardian.
On Wodehouse’s Other Writing
“For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing,” Ed Park says of P.G. Wodehouse’s collected correspondence, A Life in Letters. The Year in Reading alum goes on to note that “a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years.”