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The Back of the Face
“A neck cannot be modern. A neck is in time, belongs to time, but is not formed by it. My guess is that even photos of Neanderthal necks would not differ significantly… [They are] in a certain sense, pure nature. Something that grows in a certain place, the way tree trunks grow, or mussels, fungi, moss.” Recommended reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard on the sanctity of bodies, the nature of truth, and the back of the neck. The third volume of Knausgaard’s bestselling My Struggle hit American bookshelves last week. (Check out our own review of Knausgaard’s previous volumes.)
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A Soviet Gollum
This week in beautiful books: Eugène Delacroix once illustrated Goethe’s Faust, and Goethe himself claimed the resulting lithographs “surpassed my own vision.” A full version of the work is now available online. And in a slightly more light-hearted vein, English Russia has found and scanned a delightful Soviet version of The Hobbit, complete with a Gollum straight out of Dr. Seuss.
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The Underground Railroad: The Series
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins plans to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad as a limited-run series. In his review of the novel for our site last year, Greg Walklin gushed that “Whitehead’s brilliance is on constant display.”
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Best of Full Stop
Sure, you could look ahead to the happenings of 2012, but that’s only half as fun as recapping Full Stop‘s 2011 “Best of the Blog” archives. (Part 2 here)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Franzen, Binet, Baldwin, Müller
A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin’s memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel.
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