“In an ironic twist, Super Terrain, a publisher in France, has created a new edition of Bradbury’s classic that actually requires extreme heat in order to be read.” The prototype copy of Fahrenheit 451, which looks fully blacked-out until you apply heat, may be available to the general book-buying public in 2018. Check out: an essay about Ray Bradbury from our archives.
Book Burning Reimagined
“Smudged pink harlequin glasses”
Last week, I pointed readers to a Page-Turner essay by Amy Bloom, whose new novel, Lucky Us, came out on Tuesday. Now, as part of the By the Book series in the Times, she talks about her summertime reads, her first picture book and who she’d invite to a literary dinner party. (FYI, we’ve written about the series before.)
Triple Threat
It’s either ironic or perfectly apropos that on the day the royal baby was born, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie teamed up for a rare joint reading.
Fame: A P&L
$500,000 annual home improvements? $125,000 allotted for annual “domestic salaries and expenses?” A $95,000 tutor for Gwyneth Paltrow’s 5-year old? New York Magazine‘s “Celebrity Economy” package is as thorough and informative as it is revolting.
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Not a Title
In the first two lines of a piece in the latest New Yorker about the Alaskan poet Olena Kalytiak Davis, Dan Chiasson points out that her new book, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, has an undeniably excellent title. In describing her appeal, he says that her submissions to the canon are “anti-submissions,” by which he means that she actively rejects association with more famous poets. “Davis’s professed unworthiness is one of many tricky manifestations of her ambition,” he writes.
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Amis and Larkin: Frenemies
n+1 editor Keith Gessen wrote the introduction to Kingsley Amis’s rereleased novel Lucky Jim, and the folks at The New Statesman were nice enough to share it with all of us.
You are Katniss
Ever spent the whole day reading The Hunger Games and then found yourself paranoid that a tribute was following you? Don’t worry; you aren’t crazy. Turns out that reading a really gripping novel can cause our brains to believe we are in the body of the protagonist, and this effect can last for days after reading according to a scientific study.