BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
Reading Material
The Case for “A World Digital Library”
“All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals,” notes Robert Darnton, “because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs. The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds.”
●
●
Beyond the Mirror
Over at Bookslut, Brian Nicholson follows up our recent piece on Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces with his own review of the book, writing that “She does not need to invent books of infinite pages, for the world of what we know already contains things as strange as mirrors.” The review draws a comparison between her work and that of Borges, her close friend.
Suspenseful Degree Program
City University in London is launching the UK’s “first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels.” The degree program will allow 12 to 14 students to focus on crime writing, the UK’s second biggest genre, which raked in £87.6m in 2011.
●
●
Clearness, Wetness, Coolness
Anne Carson has a new story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, about swimming and its discontents. As she puts it, “People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties.” Pair with her first published short story in the January issue of Harper’s.
●
●
Seeing Sound
Have you ever wondered what a music note might look like? Now you have, so go and check out Resonantia by artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, a work which tests the limits of “cymatics—the patterns that sound waves induce in physical objects.” One of Louviere’s projects involved photographing the “shapes” of each of the 12 notes. Spoiler alert: G looks like a devil.
●
●
Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
●
●