Recommended Reading: This fantastic essay by Lea Page at The Rumpus on memory, family, and a whole lot more than that: “There could be no argument, no defense. It was, in a literal sense, true. I had said that.Sure, she had left out a significant portion of the truth, but in doing so, she had revealed another. That was the one memory my mother cleaved to. That was the song she chose to sing of me. I was still losing at memory.”
Love and Memory
Guerilla Reading
Does literature belong on the streets? Thanks to some forward-thinking initiatives like the Coffee Sleeves Conversation at Coffee House Press and the Chicago-based project “Poem While You Wait,” (in which poets stationed around the city produce original, on-demand poems for five dollars a piece) literature is finding its way to the masses.
Which Wilder?
We’ve written about the newly published Laura Ingalls Wilder memoir several times, but a new review in the LA Times calls attention to one of the most interesting questions raised by the work: how much influence did Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, an accomplished author in her own right, have on the final Little House books?
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Gonzo Film Crit at Gizmodo
At Gizmodo, the art of the Comcast movie summary. (My favorite is The Seventh Sign, though I Know Who Killed Me –an unforgettable piece of so-bad-its-good filmmaking–runs a close second.)
Tuesday Means New Releases
Sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman sees her debut effort The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them hit shelves today. Also new today is Not Art by Peter Esterhazy who wowed Garth at PEN/World Voices in 2008.
Traveling with Orhan Pamuk
Want to see the real Istanbul? Take a tour with the ultimate guide, Orhan Pamuk. The author showed The New York Times’s Joshua Hammer around the city. Pair with: Our review of The Museum of Innocence and our essay on his politics.
Translating Lorem Ipsum
Nick Richardson has some fun on the London Review of Books blog by discussing the challenges of translating Lorem Ipsum, a bit of filler Latin/Greek nonsense text that resembles an “extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroushian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans Wake.”
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E.M. Forster’s Prescient Sci-Fi Story
Gabrielle Bellot examines "The Machine Stops," the sole science-fiction story by E.M. Forster, which contains eerie echos of today's socially distanced world.
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