President Barack Obama shared his official summer reading list, featuring the likes of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. For other recommended reading, don’t miss our Great Second-Half Book Preview.
The President’s Summer
Modernist Myth Making
A look at how H. D.‘s interpretation of Helen of Troy differs from the traditional.
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The Grand Neglect
The story behind Le Grand Meaulnes, the neglected French classic that was beloved by Henry Miller, name-dropped by Jack Kerouac, and a potential inspiration for the title of The Great Gatsby.
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Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet’s life in NYC: Frank O’Hara it ain’t. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
Gary Shteyngart’s Book Trailer
This “book trailer” released by Gary Shteyngart for his upcoming book Super Sad True Love Story has been the cause of much recent hilarity. If you have yet to see it, look for appearances by Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney and actor James Franco.
A Room of Her Own
Recommended Listening: Sandra Cisneros on moving into her first apartment and finding a room of her own.
Techrification
“Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world.” In the London Review of Books, a native of San Fran laments her tech-drunk city.
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Wise and Beautiful
As you might expect, this grammar quiz targeted at eighth-graders from 1912 will make you feel depressed about the modern age. (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
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