Finnegans Wake, Joyce's famously unreadable masterpiece (read it online
here), was considerably
more readable
in one of its earlier drafts. Watch Joyce cross out decipherable words and replace them with less decipherable ones! Watch him end, not with a whimper, but with a
slightly less impressive whimper! Sadly,
Shem's schoolbook, which in the finished version is a
House of Leaves-esque compendium of side columns and footnotes,
was not written until much later (according to the footnotes of that section). The introduction to this draft by David Hayman, who assembled it, is
worth a read.
posted by Rory Marinich
on May 20, 2013 -
54 comments
Claire Messud: “A woman’s rant” [National Post] "Over the last week, discussion surrounding Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs, has shifted from the book to an
interview its author recently gave to Publishers Weekly, in which Messud took issue with the following question: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.”
[more inside]
posted by Fizz
on May 10, 2013 -
23 comments
At Slate.com, Ted Scheinman has written a nice appreciation of John LeCarré.
Confessions of a John le Carré Devotee
"...I could tell there was more than politics, class, and acts of stratospheric treason to be found in these pages. I adored the psychological acuity with which he roamed his characters’ heads..."
posted by Trochanter
on May 9, 2013 -
18 comments
What Is the Business of Literature? Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the “business of literature.” Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of itself. We have come to believe that the taste-making, genius-discerning editorial activity attached to the selection, packaging, printing, and distribution of books to retailers is central to the value of literature. We believe it protects us from the shameful indulgence of too many books by insisting on a rigorous, abstemious diet. Critiques of publishing often focus on its corporate or capitalist nature, arguing that the profit motive retards decisions that would otherwise be based on pure literary merit. But capitalism per se and the market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem. They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Apr 27, 2013 -
62 comments
One day, a small boy's holographic entertainment fails, so he heads out to explore the streets of abandoned shops outside. Down a forgotten alley he discovers the last ever bookshop. And inside, an ancient shopkeeper has been waiting over 25 years for a customer...
The Last Bookshop
posted by Toekneesan
on Apr 19, 2013 -
26 comments
"..it is refreshing to
see Jason Merkoski, a leader of the team that built Amazon's first Kindle, dispense with the usual techo-utopianism and say, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.”
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 9, 2013 -
90 comments
When it first surfaced in 2005, it was hailed as
'the most important Galileo find in more than a century'. Then, in June 2012,
news broke on the Ex Libris mailing list that the unique 'proof copy' of Galileo's
Sidereus Nuncius containing his original drawings of the Moon was in fact
a highly sophisticated forgery. The full story is still unclear, but the finger of suspicion points at
Marino Massimo de Caro, who in his brief reign as director of the
Girolamini Library in Naples removed
thousands of rare books in what has been described as a
'premeditated, organised and brutal' sacking of the library. Meanwhile, experts are still marvelling at the quality of the forgery:
"We’ve seen missing pages replaced in facsimile, but no one dreamed that an entire book could be forged, something that is now more easily possible because of modern technology."
posted by verstegan
on Apr 4, 2013 -
12 comments
"Reading Harriet the Spy today as an adult, I find a queer subtext throughout. Not only is Harriet the quintessential baby butch, but her best friends, Sport and Janie, run exactly contrary to gender stereotypes. Sport acts as the homemaker and nurturing caretaker of his novelist father, while Janie the scientist plans to blow up the world one day. It was as if Fitzhugh was telling us kids back in the sixties that you didn’t have to play by society’s rules,
the first lesson a queer kid has to learn in order to be happy."
posted by mokin
on Mar 30, 2013 -
74 comments
Cozy Classics are board book versions of classic novels, each story represented by 12 child-friendly words and 12
needle-felted illustrations, with the idea of developing "
early literacy"—everything children know about reading and writing before they can actually do either. Current titles include
Pride and Prejudice,
Moby Dick,
Les Miserables, and
War and Peace, with
Jane Eyre and
Oliver Twist forthcoming.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Mar 22, 2013 -
15 comments
Percy and Sagan in the Cosmos: On the 30th anniversary of "The Last Self-Help Book." "
Lost in the Cosmos is the most peculiar book of Percy's career, and in my judgment his finest achievement. I read it when it first appeared, and if you had asked me at the time whether I expected the book to be relevant in 30 years, I probably would have said no. It seemed so topical, so of its moment; and how long could that moment last? But re-reading it in preparation for this essay I saw how little it matters that many people today will know nothing or nearly nothing about Phil Donahue or Carl Sagan. Their immediate heirs are with us every day when we turn on the TV."
[more inside]
posted by resurrexit
on Mar 18, 2013 -
15 comments
Suffice it to say, Persepolis is quite a work. It’s a testament to the power of the graphic novel. The art’s simple linework helps the story feel unpretentious and direct. Persepolis was adapted as a 2007 French animated film, written and directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. Among other honors, it was nominated for an Academy Award. Why would someone want to ban such a book?
posted by Artw
on Mar 16, 2013 -
33 comments
Last August, a book titled "Leapfrogging" hit The Wall Street Journal's list of best-selling business titles upon its debut. The following week, sales of the book, written by first-time author Soren Kaplan, plunged 99% and it fell off the list. [...] But the short moment of glory doesn't always occur by luck alone. In the cases mentioned above, the authors hired a marketing firm that purchased books ahead of publication date, creating a spike in sales that landed titles on the lists.
posted by Chrysostom
on Feb 22, 2013 -
26 comments
"A talented writer such as John Jeremiah Sullivan might, fifty years ago, have tried to explore his complicated feelings about the South, and about race and class in America, by writing fiction, following in the footsteps of Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. Instead he produced a book of essays, called
Pulphead, on the same themes; and the book was received with the kind of serious attention and critical acclaim that were once reserved for novels. But all is not as it seems. You do not have to read very far in the work of the new essayists to realize that the resurrection of the essay
is in large measure a mirage." (
via)
[more inside]
posted by Rustic Etruscan
on Feb 22, 2013 -
13 comments
Flooded? A hurricane hit your house? Somebody left a
cake book out in the rain and you'll never see that recipe again? Courtesy of Heritage Preservation:
how to save wet books.
posted by MartinWisse
on Feb 21, 2013 -
9 comments
The Omnivore's
Hatchet Job of the Year rewards "the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past 12 months," with the winning critic taking home a golden hatchet and a year's supply of potted shrimp. 2013's
winner: Camilla Long, for her devastating
review of Rachel Cusk's divorce memoir,
Aftermath. Among other things, she described it as a nasty, bizarre memoir written by a "brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist."
(Via) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 18, 2013 -
71 comments
Book Club. This 30-minute programme's been on Radio 4, the BBC's premier speech radio station, since 1998. Books are announced a month in advance, giving listeners a chance to read the chosen title before the discussion. James Naughtie then interviews the book's author about it in front of an audience of his (or her) readers, who also put questions of their own. My favourites from the programme's archive include Alan Bennet (
Writing Home), Clive James (
Unreliable Memoirs), Douglas Adams (a 1 hour special on
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Elmore Leonard (
Rum Punch), James Ellroy (
Black Dahlia), PJ O'Rourke (
Holidays in Hell) and Stephen Fry (
The Hippopotamus). No doubt you'll have your own.
[more inside]
posted by Paul Slade
on Feb 12, 2013 -
8 comments
"Twenty five years ago I quit a job on Wall Street to write a book about Wall Street. Since then, every year or so, UPS has delivered to me a book more or less like my own, written by some Wall Street insider and promising to blow the lid off the place, and reveal its inner workings, and so on. By now, you might think, this game should be over. The reading public would know all it needed to know about Wall Street, and the publishing industry would be forced to look to some other industry for shocking confessions from insiders.
Somehow this isn't the case."
posted by vidur
on Feb 5, 2013 -
47 comments
"
De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves." (SLNYT)
posted by Rustic Etruscan
on Jan 31, 2013 -
26 comments
