“The best thing I ever do for my writing is to take a walk alone in the woods behind our house. Nothing else gets my writing juices flowing so well. And yes, I think that I absolutely need more quiet in our current fractured world.” For Poets & Writers, novelist Leesa Cross-Smith interviewed fellow writer Silas House about quiet books and the importance of nature in the writing process. Pair with: our own Emily St. John Mandel on the pleasures of quiet books.
In Defense of Quiet Books
Afghanistan Video
Lukas and Salome Augustin‘s breathtaking video of Afghanistan is worth a full-screen viewing. (via)
●
●
Free JSTOR Articles
JSTOR will be making 500,000 articles from over 200 journals freely available to the public. These will include items published before 1923 in the US, and published before 1870 abroad. Earlier this month, I rounded up a few pieces by people who think the entire database should be free.
●
●
Your Local Unpaid Librarian
“They would have closed, if the community hadn’t stepped forward.” The Guardian reports on the rapidly growing number of British libraries being run by volunteers, a trend driven by austerity cuts (which Corinne Purtill wrote about in these very pages just a few weeks ago).
On The Road With DFW, Part II
At Condalmo, Matthew Tiffany‘s review of David Lipsky’s new book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace: “You can’t go more than two or three pages without Lipsky’s shadow falling over the text. And you aren’t reading this book for the Lipsky, are you? The biggest problem here is that, like it or not, his fingerprints are all over it. And I didn’t like it.”