“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.” Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me, on maintaining hope and resisting defeatism.
Wild Possibilities
The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot
“[M]ore people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art.” Who other than T.S. Eliot could get away with questioning the artistic quality of Hamlet?
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Google Enters the eBookstore Ring
Google took the wraps off its long-awaited ebookstore today. Google ebooks can be bought at Google Books and are also available at Powells and indie bookstore portal IndieBound (both of which are missing out on some serious publicity by not having info about this on their front page today). The ebooks are readable on a variety of platforms, but not on the Kindle (at least not without some tweaking).
Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ – a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.”
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Gary Shteyngart, Viral Video Star
It seems like Gary Shteyngart may be embarking on a new career as a viral video star (remember his wacky book trailer for the hardcover of Super Sad True Love Story?). Here he is with Paul Giamatti in a “buddy comedy” touting the paperback.
Ed Ruscha’s Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Recreated Using Google Maps
This is a clever project from artist Pascual Sisto: Remake of Ed Ruscha’s 1967 book Thirtyfour Parking Lots using Google Maps. (The original book) (via This Isn’t Happiness)
New Sontag E-books
As of this month, all of Susan Sontag’s books are available for purchase as e-books. This means you can grace your e-reader with The Benefactor, Sontag’s debut novel, as well as Against Interpretation, which contains the seminal essay “Notes on Camp.”
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Books, A.K.A., Tree Sandwiches
Celebrate the 2010 Melbourne Literary Festival–going on now through September 5th–by watching this funny promo video, “10 Facts about Books That You Won’t Read in a Book About Books”.
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Whodunnit
And then there was you: the Oxford English Dictionary is soliciting public help in tracking down “a mysterious, possibly pornographic, 19th-century book from which a number of its quotations are derived.”
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