“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
Mistakes Happen
In 1864, Herman Melville was asked to submit a poem to a collection intended to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission – and he sent the wrong one.
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“Tough, Funny, and Sophisticated”
Sam Sacks of Open Letters Monthly offers an encomium to Pauline Kael, “one of the best movie critics – or critics of any kind – of the past century.”
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Tarot and Literature
It’s time to recognize tarot’s place in literature. Peter Bebergal writes on Jessa Crispin’s latest project, The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life.
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This is the way the film ends
Blasphemy Alert: They’re giving the film version of August: Osage County a “less downbeat” ending. Curse you, Harvey Weinstein! Is nothing sacred? Can a woman not lament the disintegration of her life, family, and mental stability while the final lines to T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are read by her housekeeper? Has America gone soft?
Prank Fodder
With April Fool’s Day approaching, it’s a good time to wonder: what kinds of horrible things will you do to the people you love? At the OUP’s blog, a list of great pranks for inspiration.
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Underground Poetry
Three cheers, NYC commuters, for the return of Poetry in Motion, the project which pairs poems with artwork on subway trains.
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