“Author Barry Hannah, whose fiction was laced with dark humor and populated by hard-drinking Southerners, died Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 67. . . . “Hannah’s first novel, ‘Geronimo Rex,’ was published in 1972. It received the William Faulkner prize for writing and was nominated for a National Book Award. His 1996 short [...]
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
R.I.P. – Barry Hannah (1942-2010)
Posted in American South, Books, Literature, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on March 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Travel Photo of the Day: Brooklyn (DUMBO), New York – Literature Versus Traffic
Posted in Books, Brooklyn, DUMBO, New York City, Photography, U.S. Travel on February 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Water Street, (DUMBO) Brooklyn (February, 2010) (See more photos from the “Literature Versus Traffic” project @ luzinterruptus)
R.I.P. – J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)
Posted in Books, Literature, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on January 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had [...]
Willful Misconduct: The Legal Battle Over Jack Kerouac’s Forged Will
Posted in Books, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Literature, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Writers & Writing on January 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“When Jack Kerouac wrote his will shortly before his death in 1969, he was broke. Forty years later, a ferocious battle rages over his multi-million dollar literary estate. Kerouac, at odds with his third wife, Stella Sampas, had left everything to his mother, Gabrielle Kerouac. But when Gabrielle Kerouac passed away in 1973, her will [...]
Today’s Sign of the Apocalypse: Laredo, Texas Could Be Largest US City Without Bookstore
Posted in American West, Books, Business, Education, Sign of the Apocalypse on December 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo (Texas). “With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller. “The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month’s planned shutdown [...]
Assaying the Essay: Zadie Smith Asks “Why Do Novelists Write Essays?”
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. [...]
Flannery O’Connor’s “The Complete Stories” Voted Best National Book Award Winner
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O'Connor's] collection ‘The Complete Stories’ was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest’s 60-year history. The competition was steep: other finalists in the poll were ‘The Stories of John Cheever,’ William Faulkner’s ‘Collected Stories,’ ‘The [...]
Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” Shortlist Announced: Roth, Oz, Theroux Face Stiff Competition
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on November 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The story of the seduction of a lesbian by an ageing stage actor, which includes an eye-watering scene with a green dildo, has won Philip Roth the dubious honour of a place on the shortlist for the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award. “Roth can comfort himself with the fact that a roll call of literary [...]
Judging A Book By Its Odor: A “Sniff Test” for Preserving Old Books
Posted in Antiques & Folk Art, Books, Europe, Science & Technology on November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Old books smell like grass, with a tang of acidity and a hint of vanilla, according to scientists who have discovered a way to tell the condition of an [sic] works by their odour. “The system can measure the degradation of old books and historical documents on the basis of their aroma. “Now the scientists [...]
Recipes for Desire: Adam Gopnik on Our Hunger for Cookbooks
Posted in Books, Food & Wine on November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer [...]
Forty-Four Years in the Making: The World’s First Historical Thesaurus
Posted in Books, Language on November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Ever wonder how people really talked in the 1800s, or 1500s, or earlier? “You can stop building the time machine. Such questions are now easier to answer than ever before, with the publication—after 44 years of work—of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. At almost 4,000 pages and about 800,000 meanings, this mind-boggling reference work [...]
R.I.P. – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Posted in Anthropology, Books, Human Behavior, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called ‘primitive man’ and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100. . . . “A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of ‘structuralism,’ a school of thought in which universal ‘structures’ were [...]
Das Book Cover Art: BLICKFANG & The Eye-Catching Cover Art of Weimar Germany
Posted in Books, Design, Europe on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Two examples from the extraordinary selection of twenty-five Weimer-era book covers and posters from the sadly out-of-print book Blickfang: Bucheinbände und Schutzumschläge Berliner Verlage 1919 – 1933 (Holstein, 2005), posted by Will on his blog, A Journey Round My Skull. (via thebookslut)
Lonelier Planet?: BBC Plans to Sell Off “Lonely Planet” Guide Series
Posted in Books, Business, Foreign Travel, U.S. Travel on October 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“It was bought amid a flurry of raised eyebrows and has sat uneasily in a global broadcasting and media stable ever since — and yesterday Lonely Planet was once again the subject of speculation, uncertainty and possibly even a little controversy. “The backpackers’ essential guides to, well, pretty much everywhere may, it seems, be heading [...]
Not So “Beloved”?: Is Toni Morrison’s Magnum Opus “The Most Overrated Novel Ever”?
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Race, Writers & Writing on October 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The most overrated novel ever has got to be Beloved. Upon its initial publication, it was rightly passed over for the 1988 National Book Award, which went to Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story, while the National Book Critics Circle handed its fiction award instead to Philip Roth for The Counterlife. In protest, forty-eight ‘black critics and black [...]
Mixed Bits: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Food & Wine, U.S. Travel on October 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Is there anything more American than Chinese food? Remember that scene in ‘Manhattan’ where Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway cozy up in bed in his cramped apartment with cardboard boxes of something in black-bean sauce while W. C. Fields plays on the television? Or the scene in ‘A Christmas Story’ when the holiday meal is [...]
The Perils of Pastrami: David Sax’s “Save the Deli”
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Food & Wine, Jewish Life, U.S. Travel on October 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“He may have written a book about Jewish food, but David Sax is quite a ham. He refers to a deli’s finances as ‘pastraminomics,’ describes a knish as being ‘baked to a George Hamiltonesque hue,’ and titles a chapter on Las Vegas’s deli scene ‘Luck Be a Brisket Tonight.’ “But in addition to Catskills shtick, [...]
Mindful Fiction: Marco Roth on “The Rise of the Neuronovel”
Posted in Books, Health & Medicine, Human Behavior, Literature, Writers & Writing on October 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes [...]
You Can Go Home Again: Philip Roth Attends H.S. Reunion Tour of Hometown Newark
Posted in Books, Jewish Life, Literature, U.S. Travel, Writers & Writing on October 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Philip Roth came home again Saturday, which is not so unusual because he’s been a frequent visitor in recent years. ‘As you get older, you get closer to home.’ Roth said this as he entered the Newark Museum yesterday as the surprise guest on a bus tour of Newark. Now 76, the man once called [...]
What’s a Culture Snob to Do?: The Future Aesthetic of Snobbery in a Digitized World
Posted in Books, Human Behavior, Literature, Popular Culture, Popular Music, Science & Technology on September 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Pity the culture snob, as Kindles, iPods, and flash drives swallow up the visible markers of superior taste and intelligence. With the digitization of books, music, and movies, how will the highbrow distinguish him- or herself from the masses?” (James Wolcott, via Vanity Fair)
