“I am nostalgic for letters. There’s a craft that’s been lost in expressing some kind of desire or passion or bodily experience for someone else.” From James Joyce to Frida Kahlo, The Guardian collects bits of great artists’ erotic missives to one another. And speaking of literary love letters, how about Nicholson Baker‘s Vox [ed. note: it makes a great Valentine’s Day gift]?
My Body Shall Be All Yours
How Long?
This week in book-related infographics: a chart of just how long it takes kids to finish popular books. Where the Wild Things Are? 4 minutes. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? 24 hours.
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Leaning
“Sandberg does not mention pleasure. Sandberg assumes instead that the feminist question is simply, how can I be a more successful worker?…Sandberg has penned not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” At Dissent, Kate Losse, herself a former Facebook employee, critiques Sheryl Sandberg’s new and controversial Lean In.
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Literary Paper Dolls
What better way to celebrate pioneering women writers ranging from Edna St. Vincent Millay to Edith Wharton than with a collection of literary paper dolls?
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Jumping Ship
How do you explain the recent “shit storm” at Granta? Let Full-Stop EIC Alex Shephard do it for you.
Child of Franco
Warning: There’s another James Franco film coming your way. His latest literary adaptation is of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. The first trailer features banjo, an ominous voiceover, an edgy Scott Haze, and surprisingly little Franco.
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Connecting the Dots
How did commas, colons, dashes, and question marks come into existence? Keith Houston writes for BBC about the history of punctuation.
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