Category Archives: Noteworthy
The Art of Extra-Illustration
As an inveterate buyer of second-hand books, I’m used to finding supplemental material inside. Usually it’s in the form of newspaper or magazine clippings, either a review of the book in question or an article about the author. Every once in a while they get a bit more esoteric—a travel article from the book’s setting, [...]
Codex Seraphinianus for the People
We’re looking at an exceptionally rainy, cold weekend here, and I don’t foresee any real reason to leave the house. So I was pleased to find out, via the Book Bench, that all of Luigi Serafini’s big, weird, trippy Codex Seraphinianus has been digitized and posted online. Serafini’s alternate world, complete with its own bizarre [...]
The Second Pass’ First Anniversary
In her keynote speech at last month’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Arianna Huffington tossed out a good point on the way to her explanation of why she doesn’t pay bloggers. (“Self expression is the new entertainment…. We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching [...]
Bookless
This week in the Guardian, constant reader Bibi van der Zee experiments with going without books for a week. Van der Zee does not give up all reading (she still reads newspapers and the internet), and she does not give up stories in general (she mentions watching Being Human); all she is avoiding is novels.
After [...]
David Foster Wallace at the Ransom Center
Somewhere in a box, I have a number of notebooks from middle school and high school. Not all of them, but some kind of random sampling that my curatorial self saw fit, once upon a time, to save. Once in a while I’ll give in to the urge to look through one, and it always [...]
Open Letters Monthly, March 2010
The March issue of Open Letters Monthly is up. Somehow it feels like only a few weeks since we introduced the February issue… all right, four weeks.
This month leads off with Kathleen Rooney’s look at five poetry collections by women—Matthea Harvey, Katy Lederer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robyn Schiff, and KarenVolkman—what they offer up and what they [...]
Reading Between the Cracks
Over on the PANK Blog, reviews editor Kirsty Logan discusses some dos and don’ts for Meanwhile Reads. I think readers who are fairly catholic in their tastes are especially predisposed to sort their literary experiences: You have your vacation reading, your bathroom reading, your insomnia reading, your commute reading. And this category of Meanwhile Reads—what [...]
Springtime and The Story Prize Awards
http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2010/03/day-after-tomorrow.html
Pimp My Article
Correction of the week comes from the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, concerning David Remnick’s upcoming Obama bio:
An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; [...]
So Many Books: The HTMLGIANT Writing Contest
Now that everyone has well and completely absorbed the Guardian’s guest writers’ fiction writing tips, as well as the other helpful voices chiming in around the internet (notably the Afterword’s 49th parallel version, which will be an ongoing series, and Laura Ellen Scott, because this is threatening to become a Serious Business already), it’s time [...]
