“You are what you brought from your country? Or you are what you learned here?” The New York Times visits Librería Barco de Papel, one of New York City’s last remaining Spanish-language bookstores. The space also operates as a community and cultural center for the Jackson Heights neighborhood, where roughly half of the 67,000 residents identify as Latino. If you want to feel some more feelings about the state of independent bookstores, check out this old Millions piece about paving paradise and putting up a Chipotle.
Leemos En Español
Tale of a Jetblack Sunrise
Every year, for six months, a mysterious Twitter account tweets the Walt Whitman book Leaves of Grass in its entirety one line at a time. At The Atlantic, Rebecca J. Rosen profiles the account, which (to the owner’s bemusement) is popular among Lana Del Rey fans.
E(volving)-Books from Black Balloon
Black Balloon created an “evolving e-book” iPad app for Louise Krug’s new memoir, Louise: Amended, and they’re giving it away for free! Plus, to sweeten the deal even further, emailing a request for the promo code will automatically enter you into a drawing for a $100 Powell’s gift card.
Picture Perfect
We pick photos to accompany writing all the time, but what do writers think about photography? At The New Yorker, photo editor Jessie Wender asked eight writers, from Jennifer Egan to Sasha Frere-Jones, what their favorite photographs are.
“a video a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s”
Open Culture dug up the only known recordings of James Joyce reading his own work. Maybe Finnegans Wake will make a bit more sense to you when you hear its thunderwords spoken out loud.
●
●
Reading Material
BuzzFeed has launched READER, a new home for literary writing, featuring an essay by Melissa Broder, poetry by Jericho Brown, and a short story from Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.
●
●
Robert M. Pirsig Dead at 88
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, died today at the age of 88, according to a statement released by his publisher. Pirsig’s work explored a system of thought called the “Metaphysics of Quality,” which has been defined as “a thesis that quality is the basis of reality, and that this understanding unifies most East Asian and Western thought.”
●
●
Colson Whitehead, Book by Book
Elevator inspectors, beach vacations, zombie movies: these are just a few of the things that have inspired Colson Whitehead's books over the years.
●
●
●