Paris Review
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Summer Camp for Book Nerds
For the burgeoning field of Critical Bibliography, “the study of the physical characteristics of books and the process of bookmaking,” Rare Book School is the highlight of the year. The Paris Review’s Benjamin Breen reports from the annual conference out…
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The Ageless Problem of Agents
The Paris Review blog discovers that in publishing the “sky is always falling.” Every year is an abysmal year for books and a terrific year for books. Editors no longer edit, except when they do; publishers care only for their…
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Great Obituaries
How does it feel to be in charge of writing about the deaths of outstanding people? Over at the Paris Review, Margalit Fox tells us about her twenty years (and twelve hundreds obituaries) at the New York Times.
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Hallelujah
Listing our literary patrons of sex-ed, Leonard Cohen doesn’t immediately come to mind. And yet: Cohen, who turns eighty on Sunday, is exceptionally good at drawing out those moments of sexual crystallization. It’s a skill that, along with his gravelly…
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Simply and Swiftly
In 1906, aged 21, D.H. Lawrence wrote to his future fiancée Louise Burrows with writing advice after reading an essay on art she’d sent to him. Among many other remarkable lines, the British author told Burrows that “[l]ike most girl…
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Seriously Serious
Over at the Paris Review, Jason Novak has taken up the pen again; this time, he’s turned to authors and their eccentricities. Among his observations: “Somewhere Hemingway is sitting quietly at his desk. Pouring another bull. And fighting another drink.”…
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What Does Anna Karenina Look Like?
The Paris Review has an excerpt from Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read that questions what we think we know about characters. Mendelsund points out that many of us feel like we know our favorite characters intimately, but when…
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Borges and Sartre at the Movies
Turns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well. Head over to the Paris…
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Happy Birthday, Mr. Maupassant
In celebration of Guy de Maupassant’s 164th birthday, Paris Review blogger Dan Piepenbring revisits his, ahem, seminal story, “Boule de Suif,” about a French prostitute who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to.” Read his coverage here, and the original…
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Spellbound
Unaccustomed, vicious, onomatopoeia… We all have that one word we can never spell correctly. Paris Review blogger Sadie Stein’s was “Wednesday.” “It’s like a mental block,” she writes, “or maybe, an increased reliance on technology.” Read the rest of the…
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A Fictionalized Betrayal
This was my first experience of being fictionalized. I still recall the yellow-white flash of queasiness, the mortification: a sense of powerlessness and an utter lack of recourse. What if a writer friend—or, worse, relative—of yours turned you into one…
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This Week in Short Fiction
Let’s dedicate this week to the publications, editors, and benevolent marketing gurus who unleashed a whole bunch of quality FREE short fiction to us. Under the shadow of the FCC’s impending decision as to whether or not net neutrality will…