Something in me
despite everything
can’t believe my luck
SURE. DYVYA. BUT THEY’RE STILL GOING TO IGNORE YOU: Cats can recognize the sound of their names, study says.
Amy Hempel Is the Master of the Minimalist Short Story
Amy Hempel’s best short stories reveal how rich spareness can be.
The Answer To Distraction? Slow Art
There’s Slow Food. There’s Slow (Longform) Journalism. Now there’s Slow Art. To get people in the mood for slow art, Christie’s, the V&A and the Natural History Museum have been offering yoga and sound meditation baths before visitors step foot into their exhibitions. But rather than putting them in a trance, it’s all about switching on their senses. – BBC
This AI Converts Quick Sketches to Photorealistic Landscapes
THAT WILL SURELY CONTRIBUTE TO FRATERNAL HARMONY: Identical twins both ordered to pay child support after inconclusive paternity test.
According to publisher Penguin Random House, [Becoming] has sold more than 10 million copies — including hardcover, audiobooks and e-books — since its November release. That puts it near the top, if not the pinnacle, of all-time memoir sales.” It’s already the top-selling hardcover of last year, and it has outsold both of her husband’s books put together.
Here is the full story.
Could Michelle Obama’s Book Become The Bestselling Memoir Of All Time?
“According to publisher Penguin Random House, [Becoming] has
sold more than 10 million copies — including hardcover, audiobooks and
e-books — since its November release. That puts it near the top, if not
the pinnacle, of all-time memoir sales.” It’s already the top-selling
hardcover of last year, and it has outsold both of her husband’s books put together. – The Washington Post
Now, in her final book, E.E.G. (that is, electroencephalogram, a recording of brain wave patterns) Ban returns, declaring, “Of course I didn’t kill myself.” It is, naturally, tempting to read Ban as a version of Drndic, but Ban himself soon dismisses the idea of autobiography, “as though my life could be pressed between the covers of a book,”
“Autobiographical books don’t exist, autobiographies don’t exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole melange of a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, remnants, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own.”
If ever there were to be a book of neglected writers, then surely Guido Morselli would deserve his place: his seven novels were only published after he died at his own hands, a suicide which was at least partly caused by the endless rejections from publishers. I first encountered Morselli via Jacqui’s review of Divertimento 1889, one of only two of his novels to have made it into English. I soon tracked down the other, Past Conditional, which tantalisingly suggested plans for further translations which never came to fruit. Coincidentally, however, Frederika Randall was translating Morselli’s fourth novel, The Communist, for New York Review of Books Classics around the same time.
TOM WOLFE MAY BE GONE, BUT WE’RE ALL STILL LIVING IN HIS VIRTUAL REALITY PROGRAM: Tom Wolfe could have invented Jussie Smollett.
‘Everybody everywhere,’ Tom Wolfe wrote in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ‘has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.’
Ingmar Bergman Grew Weary Of Making Movies. Then He Started Writing Books
The books are startlingly intimate, exploring things he felt he couldn’t convey in film. “In order to go back to the beginning, to explore with such startling intimacy the archetype of all those other women, this great artist has to find a new mode of expression—one that was, so to speak, neither wife nor mistress. A virgin medium.” – New York Review of Books
John Cochrane on money, reserves, and other stuff.
United flight attendant markets in everything, possibly soon to be thwarted.
Bacteria can travel thousands of miles through the air on its own Earth
The Day the Dinosaurs Died is an amazing tale of scientific discovery. You should read the whole thing. One sub-point, however, is a vivid description of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Which are the best autobiographies by women?
That question has been floating around Twitter, here are my picks:
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
Janet Frame, Autobiography.
Claire Tomalin, A Life of My Own.
Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis.
Golda Meir, My Life.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road.
Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures.
Am I allowed to say Virginia Woolf, corpus?
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life.
Anne Frank of course.
What else? Maybe Carrie Fisher? Maya Angelou? Erica Jong? St. Therese of Liseaux? (I Am Rigoberto Menchu turned out to be a fraud.) There are a variety of important feminist books that read like quasi-autobiographies, but maybe they don’t quite fit the category.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Dostoyevsky - Los Angeles Review of Books
What’s
the name of that Russian author you’re always talking about — the one
who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat
he found in a garbage pail?” Remi Boncoeur asks Sal Paradise in On the Road,
sounding more like he’s conjuring up the memory of Diogenes than
Dostoyevsky. “This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of
Dostoevski,” Sal comments. Remi then goes off about people with faces
that deserve a name like Dostoyevsky.
The Comma Queen Reports From The Big Copy Editors’ Convention
The New Yorker‘s Mary Norris on the American Copy Editors
Society annual conference: “But the centerpiece of the weekend is the
session at which the A.P. announces changes to its annual style guide.
It was standing room only in Narragansett A as Paula Froke, the lead
editor of the A.P. Stylebook, ran through her slides. … You could feel
the excitement in the room when a slide appeared with the heading
‘HYPHENS!'” – The New Yorker
“Dutch book lovers got free rail travel across their country’s entire network this weekend as part of the Netherlands’ annual book week celebrations. Every year since 1932 the Netherlands has encouraged reading with Boekenweek – a celebration of literature marked with literary festivals and book signings across the country. Traditionally, a well-known Dutch author writes a special novel – the “book week gift” or Boekenweekgeschenk –
