“Tea has started wars and ruined lives; we should be wary of its consolations.” On the problem with tea.
Cuppa?
A6: Edith Wharton
At some point, you’ve probably had a daydream about a vending machine that sells books. Well, guess what. (There’s also a video guide.) (Thanks, Andrew)
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In the Middle
A lot is written about artists just starting their careers, and about those artists with a lifetime of work to look back over, but in a piece for The Enemy Barry Schwabasky considers the difficulty of being somewhere in the middle of an artistic career. After all, “most artists do, for better or worse, live through what’s come to be known as their midcareer. It’s just that they don’t often do so with ease. … The middle of the journey sometimes seems to be all about losing the way.”
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No Humans, Please
Richard Adams might be the only prominent author to make his name with a novel in which all of the main characters were rabbits. In The Guardian, he talks with Alison Flood about his classic Watership Down, explaining that he first came up with the plot while telling his children a story on a car ride.
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The Tables Have Turned
First humans wrote poems made of computer code, and now computers are writing poems made of English words.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Adebayo; MacLaverty; Martin; Salter; Pamuk
Out this week: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo; Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty; Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin; The Surveyors by Mary Jo Salter; and The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…”
Michael Chabon takes on Finnegans Wake in The New York Review of Books. This is mandatory reading, class.