To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, check out 25 author’s reflections on his work. (The tube map has also been recreated in his honor.) You could also read Stefanie Peters’s thoughts on why we continue to rewrite the Bard’s stories.
400 Year of Shakespeare
Very Secret and Odd
Recommended Reading: Søren Kierkegaard and Anna Akhmatova overheard whispering on a stairwell.
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RIP Harry Crews
Dwight Garner, Maud Newton, and Jason Diamond are among the many to mourn the passing of Harry Crews this past week. “Few writers,” Garner writes of Crews, “could touch his authority and muscle.”
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Urban Homesteaders
Better late than never, here are eight great new books for Urban Homesteaders.
They’re Watching
Collusion, a new add-in for Firefox browsers, “allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web.” Of course, who’s tracking you online is one thing, but who’s tracking you in retail stores is quite another.
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Tana French on the Celtic Tiger
Tana French pegs the cause of Ireland’s financial crisis on “a total disconnect between action and consequence.” For many Irish citizens since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, she writes, “their whole sense of a world governed by coherent cause and effect, of their ability to have any agency in their own lives, came under attack.” Bonus: our own Edan Lepucki has previously written about French’s novels and plotting.
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Germany’s Top Literary Prize
The Georg Buechner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, has been awarded this year to Reinhard Jirgl, author of The Unfinished. (via AuthorScoop)
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Film Time with Steve
Looking for something to watch this weekend? Steve Buscemi’s ranked his top ten films in the Criterion Collection.
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“Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!”
Amazon collected some of the funniest, top-voted reviews from customers on its website. “Occasionally customer creativity goes off the charts in the best possible way,” they said. Of course, there are also plenty of examples of customers going off the charts in the worst possible ways, too.
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