TED-Ed illustrates Plato’s allegory of the cave in this fun video.
Illustrating the Cave
Illustrated Joyce
Stony Road Press has teamed up with the James Joyce Centre to release a limited edition handmade book, “reproducing the original 1914 text” of “The Dead,” and featuring really interesting hand printed illustrations by Robert Berry. Check out some examples here, here, and here.
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Global Fame for a Literary Icon
"She told the students not to explain too much, that they could throw in expressions in Igbo or Yoruba or pidgin and trust the reader to get it. She told them that even if a story was autobiographical it should be shaped—that, for instance, although in life you could have ten close friends, in fiction you could not, because it was too confusing. She told them to avoid inflated language—'never purchase when you can buy.'" A delightful (and somewhat rare) long profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker.
2014’s Best Book Covers
"What is the value of a book cover if fewer and fewer people shop at bookstores?" Nicholas Blechman wonders about the purpose of the book cover at The New York Times Book Review, but he also rounds up some of the best covers of 2014, including the design for Eimear McBride's A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing (Millions review here, McBride's "Year in Reading" here).
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The Harvard Hoaxer’s Bibliography
The Harvard Hoaxer's not-to-be-missed resume (pdf) includes several impressive under-contract book projects, including The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne; Wampum and the Origins of American Money; and A Short History of North America. Pretty impressive, for a 23-year-old.
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Nothing Has to Be Blown Up
"One of the joys of literature is that we can always push back against established ways of speaking and seeing—and nothing has to be blown up." Mark Z. Danielewski, whose latest novel, the first installment of a 27-book series called The Familiar, has just been released, writes for The Atlantic's "By Heart" series about "signiconic" writing, the orneriness of his work and the graphic novel Here. Pair with our 2012 interview with Danielewski.
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New from Neruda
Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda will compile never-before-seen poems from Pablo Neruda’s archives. “Forrest Gander, the Brown University professor who translated the poems into English, likens the discovery to finding a trove of new sketches by Michelangelo.” Visit Neruda’s home with Luke Epplin.
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What Soderbergh is Reading
Remember back in 2011 when Steven Soderbergh made that list (PDF) of every movie, TV show, book, play and short story he had watched that year? Well according to his recent interview with New York Magazine, the book he most recently finished is Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. (And what a coincidence! The book Murray most recently blurbed is Epic Fail, our first Millions Original.)
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