Last week the literary web was abuzz with the news that the mysterious 15th-century Voynich Manuscript would be published in a limited run; but why wait for that when you can see the manuscript yourself online now?
Get Your Rare Books Here
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Fans of Seinfeld and Arrested Development might be interested in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a comedy about a band of hapless, self-interested pub owners in which slapstick hijinks obscure the fact that nothing much ever happens (for example: a wheelchair race/brawl in a mall between two characters pretending to be handicapped to get girls). The first episode of the fifth season premiers this Friday but you can watch past episodes free at FX.
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Need something to read?
If you’re in need of a great read this week, you’ll be glad to know that Byliner has compiled a list of 101 spectacular nonfiction stories from 2011. They run the gamut from investigative to personal to borderline trivial: There’s Mac McClelland’s incredibly daring and disturbing essay on working through PTSD through controlled sexual violence, alongside Jon Mooallem’s history of the high five. Happy reading!
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No Lie
“One lie I tell is that we care, generally—human beings—about each other. We could not, I tell myself in the moments just before the night’s dark hour, create The Odyssey or King Lear or Thomas and Beulah without a profound sense of The Other. Surely, were it true this thing’s a joke, nothing more, and a cruel one at that, we’d have no Dickinson, no Yeats, no freakin’ Rumi, read by Bly, loud on an old tape deck while I shower.” Pablo Tanguay on the art of lying.
Wells Tower on Mitt “Tin Man” Romney
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower hit the campaign trail with presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and his lengthy piece entitled “Desperately Seeking Mitt” is sure to ruffle some red-colored feathers.
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Why A New Madame Bovary?
Lydia Davis, whose new translation of Madame Bovary comes out September 23, blogs at The Paris Review Daily about why we need yet another translation of Flaubert.
Hope in the Dark
“Most of all, they don’t tell you that fear, to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis, will feel so like grief, and so you begin to mourn what you have not yet lost, because mourning prematurely is the only way to protect yourself from hope.” For Catapult, Laura Turner writes about her trio of miscarriages and the hope she lost (and found) along the way. (Turner is a 2017 Year in Reading alum).