For the Atlantic, Sarah Boxer recounts her experience reading In Search of Lost Time on her cell phone. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s year of reading Proust.
Reading Proust
How Chris McCandless Died
For those of you who won’t rest until you find out the truth about how Chris McCandless died, know that neither will Jon Krakauer. His recent discoveries appear in the afterword to a new edition of Into the Wild, released in 2015. Also check out this Millions essay on extreme survival books.
In/sane
If you’re not already a fan of Will Self, his new book, Shark, may not be the best place to start. As Walker Rutter-Bowman points out, the book dispatches with many of the conventions of modern writing, including line breaks, paragraphs and dialogue tags. But it’s still an effort worthy of its author, he writes: “Here is a hunk of modernism that poignantly, beautifully, and, it seems, genuinely renders mental states of sanity and insanity while smudging the gradations in between.”
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Vote Knope
The most important news of 2013 so far: Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler is currently writing a memoir, to be published in fall of 2014.
A Conceit with No Conscience
“[L]ike many, many other rules in the English language, it turns out this one is built on a foundation of lies.” That whole ‘i before e, except after c rule? Bunk. Which you would already know, if you were a true spelling bee hopeful.
Brief Encounters with Sayrafiezadeh
Hot on the heels of our own review of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, Full-Stop publishes an interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. What makes it especially interesting, however, is that their interviewer is Scott Cheshire, who also wrote our review.
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