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A helping hand
This week, Melville House is donating all profits from books purchased on their website to Japan disaster relief.
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And Also With You
We’ve heard a lot about “Cool Pope” Francis in the past few weeks. For a take on the Vatican that’s a bit different from the usual fare, check out this piece from the London Review of Books on the pontiff’s battle against corruption among the cardinals in Rome.
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Mad Men Make Love
With the season five premiere of Mad Men fast approaching, now’s as good a time as any to catch up on the intimate commingling of its main characters. Fortunately, the folks at Wired have organized the whole thing into a neat “Illustrated Guide to Mad Men Bed-Hopping.”
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Love – Love
“When the French would go to serve, they often said, Tenez!, the French word for ‘take it,’ meaning ‘coming at you, heads up.’ We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game ‘ten-ez’ by association. A lovely detail in that it suggests a scene, a Florentine ear at the fence or entryway, listening.” Whether it’s David Foster Wallace or John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about tennis, I’m reading it. Another three-namer, Jonathan Russell Clark, reviewed The David Foster Wallace Reader for The Millions.
Pulitzer Followup
The Washington Post has a good roundup of all the books that were recognized by the Pulitzer judges yesterday. Also, it turns out that Franz Wright, who received the poetry Pulitzer yesterday, is the son of the late poet James Arlington Wright, who won the Pulitzer in 1972 for his Collected Poems.
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Ms. Lonely: Olivia Laing in the Lonely City
At the end of 'The Lonely City,' Laing does not offer up novel “answers,” either to her own loneliness or the reader’s; it’s not clear, even, whether the book feels loneliness is a problem to be solved.