“Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.” Lauren Young writes in Atlas Obscura about the phenomenon of bibliomania, “a dark pseudo-psychological illness” that afflicted upper-class victims in Europe and England during the 1800s. And for a first-hand account of more contemporary book theft, read John Brandon on his high school pastime: “The first time was nerve-racking, a rush, but by the third book I was already settling in.”
Biblio-klepto-mania
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“Jawline of an aircraft carrier”
“It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it’s both daring and brilliant.” At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir is surprised by Anna Karenina.
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A Bimbo, A Gold Digger, and a Fat Pig Walk Into a Bar
“The faceoff with the Tomato would be mental, not physical. He’d accuse her of being on the rag, a bimbo, a gold digger, a fat pig.” A Trump-inspired short story by Year in Reading alumna Darcey Steinke.
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Asian American Writers, Generation Next
The Guardian‘s Max Liu highlights several rising star Asian American authors, including Year in Reading 2017 participant Jenny Zhang. “After years on the peripheries of US fiction and poetry, Asian American authors have stepped into the spotlight during 2017. Books by writers of east and south-east Asian heritage are one of the hottest trends this year. […] Transcultural writers, born to immigrant parents in the US or immigrants themselves as children, they are channelling their experiences into writing that, with perfect historical timing, challenges readers to resist attacks on immigrants’ rights and to see refugees as individuals with unique stories.”
The Experience of Being Human
Recommended Reading: Over at BOMB Magazine, Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey discuss strategies for a non-interview, why they write, and poetry’s “direct utility toward experience.”
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My Backward People
“Our literary culture has distended and warped by focusing so much power in a singular place, by crowding the gatekeepers into a small ditch of commerce. A review in the Times trumps everything else. You can’t tell me that this doesn’t affect what is, finally, bound into books, marketed, and sold. Which designates what can be said and how one says it. Why do we cede American letters to a handful of corporations that exist on a single concrete patch?” This piece by Matthew Neill Null at The Literary Hub raises a lot of extremely important questions about what gets published and why.
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Northrop Frye… “a prodigy whose promise was entirely fulfilled.”
The latest issue of the University of Toronto Magazine has an informative, if slightly hagiographical, tribute to the literary critic Northrop Frye. This year marks a century since his birth.
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I shipped five cartons of books from San Diego (home, at the time, to some world-class secondhand book shops) to Berlin… I had some hand-trembling finds in the shops of that city. As each carton arrived I was summoned to customs. The fifth carton arrived in the form of an ominous grey sack provided by the US postal service: the carton had somehow burst en route. It wasn’t until I’d unpacked all the cartons and gotten the books on shelves, a few days later, that I noticed that nineteen or twenty books were missing… and almost all of the missing books were written by Anthony Burgess. My Burgess collection was wiped out, along with several airport-purchased paperbacks of so-so crap I’d used to get through various flights. International shipping book thief with widely variable taste!