“[T]he school has calculated that the overdue fine would have been £7,446.” Granddaughter returns her grandfather’s library book after 120 years, is forgiven all late fines, reports The Guardian.
A Little Late
The Hunted
Veterans of writing workshops will know that a good story has a heavy dose of conflict. One can add it to a story in many ways, but one of the best and most reliable is to add a predator, either in the form of a threatening organisation or an animal or person with malicious intent. At the Ploughshares blog, Year in Reading alum Megan Mayhew Bergman reflects on predatory literature.
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The Moralist With the Dragon Tattoo
Tim Parks takes Stieg Larsson seriously - sort of - in the NYRB.
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Franco Takes on the Bundrens
The first official trailer has been released for James Franco’s As I Lay Dying adaptation. The film will premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
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Hatchet Job Prize
Turns out Americans aren't the only ones who adore snark. The novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones has won the first Hatchet Job prize from the British website Omnivore for his blistering takedown of Michael Cunningham's latest novel, By Nightfall. Mars-Jones beat out Geoff Dyer's slam of Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. "It isn't terrible," Dyer wrote, "it's just so...average."
How the Sausage Gets Made
"Being a judge for the Man Booker prize has at times felt like being part of a team of archaeologists excavating some vast buried city. Once the dust has settled – after nine months of reading – you stand back to survey your labours and realise all that’s left is a small pile of gleaming fragments. I hadn’t expected the process to be quite so emotionally exhausting. Nor had I thought it would be quite so exhilarating." In case you're curious, a Man Booker Prize arbiter offers up his reflections on the judging process. See also: the shortlist itself, which has surprised many readers!
Toole’s Place in the South
Did you really dig Cory MacLauchlin’s Millions article on The Lost Manuscript to A Confederacy of Dunces? If so, you’ll love this interview with MacLauchlin in Deep South Magazine.
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Stay Away from the Semicolon
“The Crested Asterisk camouflages itself in poor syntax, relying on this tactic to confuse its predators and prey. It is the only specimen known to cause injury by way of over-emphasis.” Introducing a field guide to rare punctuation.
Reading Through Trauma
“My whole life, I had used stories, both my own and other people’s, to check out of grocery store lines and long bus trips, stints in doctors’ waiting rooms, heartache, my own depression, and finally of the tedious exhaustion of new motherhood. Now, here I was in this 15-by-20 room, where monitors and alarms were constantly beeping, and there was no way out, except the unimaginable.” Alyson Foster, author of Heart Attack Watch, writes about her son’s illness and her love of reading.
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