At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, S. Brent Plate discusses the place of book marginalia as we go…
Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and…
At Marginalia, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Darryl W. Stephens reviews a new history of 19th century marriage by Leslie Harris. Harris’s book documents the ways…
LARB’s Marginalia Review of Books recently published a series of essays on the future of tenure. While addressing the academic labor crisis, the series digs deeply into our wider national…
While Tim Parks doesn’t want to be prescriptive, he offers his own techniques as inspiration: Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always…
While some bibliophiles hold books as sacred artworks to be carefully preserved, others can’t read without a little back-and-forth. Laura Miller makes a case for defacing pages: Marginalia is a…
For the New Yorker, Lauren Collins looks at what she calls “the original comments section”—old notes written in the margins of books—and our modern obsession with them.
After finding a paperback novel strewn on an airport bench with the note: “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to…
Literary organization English PEN has chosen an interesting way to raise funds: ask authors to annotate first editions of their books, and then auction them off. J. K. Rowling is…
Here’s a different kind of year-end book list: for the New York Times, Sam Anderson looks back at the notes he left in his reading material during 2012. Have you scribbled…