reading
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A Life in Books
Often I wouldn’t be able to keep up, like with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but it made it feel like a whole new world of books had been opened up to me, dangerous and menacing and completely appealing to my teenage…
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People Read Everywhere
Photographer Lawrence Schwartzwald finds people reading just about everywhere. He’s been going around New York City, snapping pictures of people reading books in unlikely places. Slate caught up with Scwartzwald, who explains his fascination with people and their books: You…
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AWP 2015 Offsite Event: GUTTER TALK
The Rumpus and Fence are proud to present GUTTER TALK, an AWP 2015 offsite event!
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Let a Bot Pick a Book for You
If you find it hard to choose a book from among the endless titles that are available, Readgeek is the tool you need. Over at Bustle, Hannah Nelson-Teutsch tested the new online recommendation bot, unexpectedly finding it extremely reliable.
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A Place (Not) For Reading
Reading a book is wholly antithetical to the purpose of a bar. The purpose of a bar is to socialize, be it with friends, lovers, potential lovers or complete strangers. Sean Manning is endorsing quite an unpopular position over at…
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Finish What You Started
But if a novel starts well and descends into trash, then it seems to me that it’s worth continuing to see if it gets better, or to see where the writer went wrong. And if it was bad from page…
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The Upside of Movies Based on Books
New data shows that when the movie version of a book comes out, kids actually go read the book. The book versions of The Hunger Games, The Lorax, and The Giver all gained new readers around the releases of their…
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Reading Incompetent
Are we right to be nostalgic for a time before the internet when we could just read? Katy Waldman, writing for Slate, wonders if we might be misremembering things. I also realize, typing this confession of pathological distractibility, that I may…
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Writer Reading Grants
Writers often find grants to help them write, but writers also need to read. The Luminaries author Eleanor Catton, last year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize, plans to set money aside to award grants to writers to allow them…
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Can Poptimism Save Literary Culture?
Literary criticism suffers from elitism, claims Elisabeth Donnelly over at Flavorwire, and the solution is introducing a poptimism revolution. The term poptimism originated in the music world as a reaction to stodgy music reviewers’ love of Bob Dylan and “argues…
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The Science of Why You Can’t Read Good Literature
Writer Michael Harris discusses digital distraction and reading War and Peace at Salon: But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off the rest of the world. We don’t know that the…
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Rereading the Same Story Every Day, Forever
When she first began so long ago, long before she knew how many days every day could be, she’d worried. Had she chosen the right story? Would it retain its power over time? Would she be able to read it…