“A few weeks ago, I texted my writing group, ‘All I really want is to be just famous enough to have my own celebrity book club.’ I was kind of kidding. But I kind of wasn’t. Because, like portion-packaged organic snacks delivered to your door, isn’t book club ownership one step closer to having it all?” Laura Briskman on the faux intimacy of celebrity book clubs, as more and more celebrities start their own post Oprah.
Some Thoughts on Celebrity Book Clubs
Tuesday Links: More LBC, Bookride, Vonnegut
My nominee for this round has been posted at the LBC blog. Though it didn’t grab my cohorts enough to be named our “Read This” pick, I do highly recommend it.I recently happened upon bookride, a blog by a rare book dealer that each day posts about a valuable book, explaining why the book is collectible and why it’s worth what it is. Fascinating stuff. A recent post looks at a rare copy of The Waste Land.Simon at Bloggasm rounded up a bunch tributes to Kurt Vonnegut including a slightly modified version of my post from last week.
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Out There
Some writers find their voices by heading off to Europe. Others (like Thoreau in Walden) head off to the woods instead. At The Rumpus, David Biespiel writes about the year he moved to Vermont, and what it meant to see himself as “leaning into” his youth. Pair with our own Anne K. Yoder on Ken Kesey and the Oregon coast.
On O’Casey
As Seán O’Casey’s play “The Silver Tassie” is revived at London’s National Theatre, three Irish actors tell The Guardian how they feel about famed playwright. “I’d say he’s on a par with your Shakespeare,” Niamh Cusack says.
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Who You Calling “Late,” Buddy?
Behold the launch of Bloom, a fabulous new website (founded by our own Sonya Chung) that pays attention to older writers who meet her definition of “Late Bloomers.” (In case you’re wondering, the site spun off from our own Post-40 Bloomers series).
Certain Loyalties
In his novels and plays, Sebastian Barry often focuses on segment of Irish society that tends to get ignored in literature — the Irishmen who fought for the British Empire in the first and second World Wars. At Full-Stop, John Cussen reads The Temporary Gentleman, which portrays a British officer, Jack McNulty, who sets out to write his memoirs. (Related: Matt Kavanagh wrote a piece for The Millions on Irish financial fiction after the crash of 2008.)
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I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
“[L]et’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.” A new Emily Dickinson exhibition proves the poet wasn’t nearly as much of a recluse as we’ve been led to think, writes Daniel Larkin for Hyperallergic. Pair with this piece on Paul Legault’s English-to-English translations of her poetry, which “transports Dickinson into mostly fortune-cookie length snippets of contemporary English, a dialect spoken widely in urban pockets like Brooklyn, where increasing numbers of the highly educated and literary classes live, procreate, keep each other amused, and make their own cheese.”
Interview With a Bookseller
“We have a customer who eats Bibles. She’s very nice, but she will walk up to a section, rip out a page, and eat it. She much prefers Catholic versions—she won’t touch King James Bibles.” This interview with the owner of Brattle Book Shop in Boston illustrates the peculiar idiosyncrasies of daily bookstore life. For all you romantics out there, here is a love letter to the brick-and-mortar bookstore.