1. Something got into me and I live-blogged George Bush’s televised State of the Union speech last night on my “other blog”. I should probably never try this again, but I tried it and the sorry results are there for all to see.
2. This is amazing. Literary blogger and hopeful bookstore entrepeneur Jessica Stockton Bagnulo submitted a business plan for a Brooklyn bookstore in a competition and won. The amount of the award is enough to …
It’s a subject I seem to find fascinating on a repeated basis: what to do with a writer’s work once the writer is dead. The latest thing to spark my interest on the subject was an article I read recently on Slate: Dmitri’s Choice: Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches? The issue at hand is that Nabokov left behind an unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura, and requested that it be destroyed …
Historian Geoffrey C. Ward has written a beautiful, sonorous cover article for this weekend’s New York Times Book Review on Drew Gilpin Faust’s somber new The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.
It’s a picture-perfect essay, but in fact readers of the Book Review aren’t necessarily satisfied with eloquence; we also wish to be broadened and enlightened by the articles we read here, and I strain to find the slightest note of urgency or surprise in Ward’s essay. Instead, it’s …
1. When a friend pointed me to The Mysterious Stranger, I could make no sense of what appeared to be an odd piece of animated YouTube weirdness involving Mark Twain and Satan in a “Davey and Goliath” version of “The Devil Went Down To Hannibal” … until a trip to Wikipedia cleared things up. The Mysterious Stranger is based on a unfinished story Mark Twain worked on for twenty years, and the story catches Twain in an uncharacteristically stark, allegorical (and perhaps …
Another weekend, another New York Times Book Review. I’m already interested in Geraldine Brooks’ novel People of the Book and the real-life “Sarajevo Hagaddah” it revolves around, and Lisa Fugard’s consideration increases my appetite, even though she is “left wishing Brooks had found a less obtrusive way to gather up the many strands of her narrative.” If wishes were horses …
I’m also interested in The Delivery Man, the debut novel by Joe McGinniss (in fact I’m about to read this story …
1. A Christmas Memory - Truman Capote
Alright, I know Christmas is so over, but I have to give this story a mention because I think it’s pretty much perfect and I’m a sap, because the end always makes me cry a little bit. Sue me. (Text)
2. Good Country People - Flannery O’Connor
I love Flannery O’Connor. So much so that once when I was talking to a guy about books, I knew I couldn’t date him because when I …
Consider my mind boggled. Here’s a quote, published in the Bits Blog (Business, Information, Technology, Science) at the New York Times, referring to Amazon’s Kindle e-book device:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Wow. I am generally fond of Steve …
It was a few minutes before 7 pm, and at least fifty people were waiting politely in folded chairs for novelist Joyce Carol Oates at the new Tribeca Barnes and Noble in Manhattan tonight. They should have been sitting at the Starbucks on the other side of the store, because that’s where Joyce Carol Oates was, demurely sipping a grande coffee in a black dress with poet Lawrence Joseph, noticed by just a respectful few.
The crowd swelled by the time John Freeman introduced …
