“He was surely the greatest literary editor there has ever been – brilliant, autocratic, endlessly curious and possessed of an extraordinary fund of knowledge about a vast range of subjects. True, he was not always easy to deal with, but when has the best ever been easy?” John Banville on the late Robert Silvers.
His Gift for Matching Books to Reviewers Was Uncanny
Quick Reads
Recommended Reading: Carl Wilson on short books and “too long; didn’t read” syndrome.
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Badly Drawn Authors
Hooray, consumerism! Or, Happy Valentine’s Day, rather. For all you literary saps out there, here are seven valentines of badly drawn authors that are sure to thaw any frozen hearts. Don’t worry, there are plenty more badly drawn authors where those came from.
Sedaris by the Sea
Recommended Reading: David Sedaris’s essay about his sister Tiffany’s suicide, “Now We Are Five,” for The New Yorker. “How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.”
Requiescat in pace, TriQuarterly
TriQuarterly, the long-running trail-blazing literary journal more or less dreamed into existence by the late Charles Newman, is apparently no more, due to budget cuts at Northwestern University. Newman’s foreword to his first issue as editor, reprinted at A Public Space, should be required reading for anyone thinking about the purpose and future of the little magazine and its role in the artistic ecology.
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Just Lie Down
“Will excessive drinking unleash your creative energy? Who can say?” Over at The Toast, intrepid cataloger Ren Arcamone has compiled a list of things you could be doing instead of writing your thesis. Go read it instead of writing your thesis. Continue the stay of essay execution and check out Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious (and helpful) guide to some common signs that you might be dying in a Victorian novel.
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Books, A.K.A., Tree Sandwiches
Celebrate the 2010 Melbourne Literary Festival–going on now through September 5th–by watching this funny promo video, “10 Facts about Books That You Won’t Read in a Book About Books”.
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Alzheimer’s & Literature
“It’s a critical dilemma in my reading and writing but also a real-life dilemma in a family like mine, with Alzheimer’s in our genes: How do you locate the personhood in someone who is, for neurobiological reasons, no longer the person you knew? Is there a way to be true to medical fact and still find something that is transcendently human?” Stefan Merrill Block writes about the literature of Alzheimer’s and Matthew Thomas‘s We Are Not Ourselves, which Lisa Peet reviewed for The Millions.
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