Have you looked thoroughly at our Summer Reading List for Wretched Assholes Who Prefer to Wallow in Someone Else’s Misery and still aren’t sure what to read? Maybe this helpful flow chart from the Strand Bookstore, via LitHub, will help you settle on something.
Summer Reading Is Confusing
The Cartoon Curator
Didn't find the latest New Yorker cartoon funny? Take it up with The New Yorker's cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, who discusses the magazine's "idea drawings" and humor in his TED talk, Anatomy of a New Yorker Cartoon. Bonus: check out Mankoff's favorite New Yorker cartoons.
Joyce and Carroll
"But reading Finnegans Wake is more than a matter of collecting one’s favorite quotations – even if there is a huge pleasure in that, especially if you admire truly terrible jokes." Michael Wood writes an essay on James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and the origins of clever wordplay for the London Review of Books.
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Get Your Poetry On
Danielle Pafunda celebrates her daylong reign over the Academy of American Poets’ Twitter feed with a cento contest: She tweets the lines, you compose the poem, and three winners take home a selection of signed books written by these contest judges.
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Words on the street.
Ian Crouch on the place of real estate in the novel, and its tenedency to "reinforce our modern sense that the appearance of our houses, and the taste and class that they represent, are among the defining elements of modern selfhood."
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“PV”
After sixteen years of work, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, "the world’s only celebrity translation team," have finally finished translating all of Tolstoy, ending with last fall's Hadji Murat. Humanities interviews them, and back in 2009, so did we.