“You can’t read books all the time; trust me, I’ve tried (and like I said to the officer, at least I wasn’t texting and driving).” Simon Lowe chooses his 10 favorite book podcasts for The Guardian. We featured a list of some must-listens earlier this year too.
Read with your Ears
William Blake(s)
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Smaller Items
Last week I asked "What about J.T. Leroy?" I was wondering when the Leroy hoaxers were going to come forward. Now, one of them has. Warren St. John of the New York Times got Geoffrey Knoop to come clean on the record. Knoop also said that he didn't think Laura Albert, who wrote the Leroy books, would ever come forward: "'For her, it's very personal,' he said. 'It's not a hoax. It's a part of her.'"Meanwhile, PopMatters put together a special section about Leroy and James Frey. I enjoyed The Rake's related comments on why Frey can't hold a candle to Charles Bukowski.I saw Brokeback Mountain a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. In an excerpt from Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, Annie Proulx describes what it was like seeing her story on the screen: "I felt that, just as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse's brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images." (via Maud)This Boston Globe column articulates quite precisely how I feel about the strife surrounding the cartoons of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.
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Curiosities: A Decision To Incorporate A Cold Motif
"Dibs on Darcy... You can have Wickham!"SNOOTs slander Strunk & White.New York Magazine offers an exhaustive - nigh unto Talesian - look at the marriage of Gay and Nan.For Colson Whitehead, "The Coolest Writer in America is obviously [DC Comics villain] Mr. Freeze..."...while, for luminaries at the PEN gala, it's Mr. Doctorow.Vanity Fair on "The New Yiddishists": "They have this idea they don't want to be pigeonholed." Oops.Bookslut decamps for Berlin, where she will become, presumably, Buchschlampe.For "that pleasant L.A. malaise," see this annotated reading list.Cool old covers for sci-fi chestnuts (via The Book Bench)......and hot new covers for classics (via The Second Pass).Joseph O'Neill becomes the latest beneficiary of President Obama's literary stimulus plan.The exclamation mark is back!!!The Esquire Fiction Contest is also back. All entries must be titled "Twenty-Ten," "An Insurrection," or "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again."S.E. Hinton was literary royalty at the L.A. Times book festival.
Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
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The Graphics of Storytelling
The New York Times asked graphic artists if “the power of storytelling could be communicated in one panel,” and they responded in comics, of course. For more comics, read Paul Morton’s essay on the 25th anniversary of Drawn and Quarterly.
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The Perils of “Showrooming”
Emma Straub, whose Year in Reading piece ran this week, has written a great article on the perils of "showrooming."