Jim Harrison, outdoorsman and author of Legends of the Fall, has passed away at 78. Harrison was a prolific writer whose lust for life was evident in the scores of essay and poetry collections he published during the course of his career. Our own Bill Morris has some thoughts on why Harrison never managed to garner the audience that a writer of his caliber deserved.
RIP Jim Harrison
Best Book Covers of 2009
Amazon has 60 books in 10 categories up for a vote for “Best Book Covers of 2009.” There’s plenty of literary eye candy in the mix.
Wharton is the Original Gossip Girl
On this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Rebecca Mead recommends (seriously) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — “the real thing” — for teen-readers who love the Cecily von Ziegesar Gossip Girl series.
Such Thing As a FAT MIND?
“Directly you are in motion you will feel quite helpless, and experience a sensation of being run away with, and it will seem as if the machine were trying to throw you off.” The bicycle was little more than a confusing craze back in 1877. The London Library has just uncovered some fascinating and hilarious vintage educational pamphlets on everything from ‘The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports’ to ‘Cycling As a Cause of Heart Disease.’
If It Is Fine Tomorrow
This list of the ten best weather events in fiction history includes, among other things, the mud in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and the fraught weather forecast from Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Let’s talk a little bit more about weather with this review from The Millions.
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Written History
The New Republic takes a look at Adrienne Rich’s never-before-seen letters, which trace her feminist awakening.
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Greenwell’s Debut
“What Belongs to You is a haunting, gorgeous, and fierce debut, capturing desire in every sentence—holding the space of what we long for and what can never truly be ours.” The Rumpus reviews Garth Greenwell’s debut novel. To compare and contrast, pair with our review of the novel.
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96 Years Later
“Her storytelling is magical and profound, creating connectivity between people and places: a signal of hope at a particularly divided moment in time.” Joining the company of Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, and Sjón, Turkish novelist Elif Şafak has been chosen as the fourth contributor for The Future Library Project. Şafak’s novel, Three Daughters of Eve, was featured in the second-half of our 2017 Great Book Preview.