“Echoes are etched into the pages thanks to margin-scrawled notes, a yellowed coffee splatter or sticky peanut-butter-and-jelly fingerprints.” In her project “Expired,” photographer Kerry Mansfield documents the life of library books. We suggest pairing The Guardian‘s gallery of her photos with our own Jacob Lambert‘s “Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book.”
Expiration Date
Beckett’s Bones
80 years ago Samuel Beckett’s publisher rejected his short story “Echo’s Bones” because it gave him the “jim-jams.” The 13,500-word piece on the afterlife was intended for More Pricks Than Kicks until his editor Charles Prentice claimed, “People will shudder and be puzzled and confused; and they won’t be keen on analysing the shudder.” Fortunately, it will finally be published by Faber and Faber on April 17.
A More Sinister Effect
It’s not always a given that good people make good characters. Over at The Atlantic, Tony Tulathimutte explains how none other than one Philip Roth taught him the importance of showing every aspect of your characters–even the bad ones. Here’s an older piece from the same series in which Paul Lisicky writes about Flannery O’Connor and her “flawed characters.”
Saying Without Saying
Giles Harvey discusses the ways in which Anton Chekhov’s characters — as dramatized in his stories and a new stage production — “long to express their innermost desires … but instead they find themselves saying things like, ‘Why did I go out to lunch?’ “
In Memory of Vic Chesnutt
NPR’s Terry Gross remembers Vic Chesnutt with Michael Stipe and Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto. Chesnutt, one of the musical gems to emerge from indie-rock mecca Athens, Georgia, in the past twenty years, died on Christmas day.
The Poor Mouth
You’ve likely heard that artists these days are in trouble. The probability that your average creative person will make a living from their art is getting smaller by the day. But amidst all this hand-wringing, we forget one simple fact — it’s always been getting worse, and there’s always been something killing culture. At Slate, Evan Kindley writes about Scott Timberg’s new book Culture Crash, asking whether the Internet is really the dread force it’s often made out to be.