“[YOU can only speak to what you experienced outside several seconds after your coworker entered the building, but several seconds before YOU yourself reached your cubicle. YOU do not know if it is in fact still raining out. YOU say nothing and are forever plagued by the unknowable nature of the immediate present.]” These short existentialist plays starring you and your coworkers are sure to stir up some feelings of gloom, doom, and familiarity.
Waiting for Lunch Break
That’s Not Leather
In horrifying book news, the binding of one of Harvard College Library’s books has been confirmed to be human skin.
Talk of the Town
Michael Wolff’s palace intrigue book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse has dominated the news cycle this week. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter, publisher Henry Holt and Co. responded by pushing the publication date up four days. Currently #1 on Amazon’s Bestseller list, many independent booksellers say they have sold all their copies as well.
Infinite Boston
Earlier this month William Beutler, a D.C. based writer, started a blog about the landmarks in Boston that inspired the landscape of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Beutler does a great job chronicling the real-life history of different buildings and explaining how DFW altered them to fit into his novel.
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Silvertongued Wilson
Though Mark Twain first gained notoriety after publishing an essay about a famous jumping frog, the onetime Samuel Clemens didn’t really hit his stride until he became a public speaker, as the money he accrued from reading in front of audiences gave him a steady source of income. At Salon, Ben Tarnoff recounts Twain’s journey to the podium, one laid out more broadly in Tarnoff’s book about a group of San Francisco writers.
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Brickjest
Infinite Jest may have “really taken on a foothold as the ‘novel of ideas’ of the late 20th and early 21st centuries” but now it’s also a “novel of legos,” courtesy of Kevin Griffith and his 11 year old son, Sebastian.
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Bloomberg’s Daughter
“When a writer is born into a family,” wrote poet Czeslaw Milosz, “that family is finished.” Well, now Michael Bloomberg can say goodbye to his family. Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of New York City’s three-term mayor, has penned The A Circuit a roman a clef about the daughter of blunt-talking Wall Street billionaire who “owns half of New York.”