“A subject to which intellectuals never give a thought,” wrote Isabelle Eberhardt in a notebook, “is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom.” The Paris Review‘s excellent column, “Feminize Your Canon,” returns with Eberhardt, a cross-dressing Swiss explorer and author who published under a male pseudonym as a teenager. Learn about her uncompromising life filled with intrigue, adventure, and passion.
Isabelle Eberhardt, Dependent on Chance
****!
Oh, shit: looks like many of our curse words are quickly going extinct. (There is good news, however, contained in this delightful sentence: “Still, according to Sheidlower, f-bomb enthusiasts need not fret too much.”)
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The Writing Life Fantasy
Admit it, at one point or another you had a certain idea of what a writer’s life looks like. What comes to mind when someone says “I’m a writer?” You may picture a struggling hipster artist who lives in a smal apartment with books everywhere and does nothing but read and write. Rosalie Knecht explores the fascinating idea that we associate certain specific images with the writer lifestyle based off an Anthropologie catalogue. Not convinced? Read it for yourself.
Tuesday New Release Day: Shriver, Leyner, Keret, Sebald, Larkin
New this week are The New Republic by Lionel Shriver, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner, Suddenly, a Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret, W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, and The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin.
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But I wanna have it both ways.
Alexander Nazaryan joins legions of hand wringers in this short rumination on children’s reading and e-reading. Me, I just want it both ways.
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The Real 24-Hour Bookstore
At one point, the only 24-hour bookstore was in Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but Beijing has the first real 24-hour bookstore. The Sanlian Bookstore will be open around the clock for book lovers and insomniacs alike.
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