“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.” What would today be without a bit of Mother’s Day-inspired Recommended Reading? Head over to Brain Pickings and learn why psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott believes that mothers are so vital.
Asking To Be Born
Jefferson on Construction
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Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask
At FiveChapters this week, you can read an excerpt of Sam Lipsyte’s forthcoming novel, The Ask.
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Mania for Classification
Our own Emily St. John Mandel is in conversation with Laura van den Berg over at the FSG blog. “We have such a mania for classification, don’t we? Everything just seems so black-or-white, one-or-zero, genre-or-literary sometimes, and I don’t think those divisions are especially helpful.” The authors are Year in Reading alumni, and you can check out Mandel’s and van den Berg’s posts at the respective links.
The Deletionist
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
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Good Ol’ Fashioned Library Feud
Due to some outcry, Robert Darnton comes to the defense of the New York Public Library’s proposed expansion and revamping.
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I Think I’ll Get It Done Yesterday
Are you reading this because you’re procrastinating? Do you happen to be a writer? We thought so. At The Atlantic, Megan McArdle explores why writers are the worst procrastinators. Hint: It’s because we have a bad case of imposter syndrome. This isn’t the only theory on why we procrastinate, though.
New Murakami Coming in August
Big news: It looks like Haruki Murakami’s much-anticipated new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage finally has a U.S. publication date: August 12, 2014.
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