Read a Book, Get a Free Bus Pass
In Chuj-Napoca, Romania’s second-most populous city, an initiative passed to offer book-reading passengers free bus fare during a week in June. The initiative was started by a local citizen’s suggestion…
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The Independent
20 posts
A Solitary Figure
For The Independent, Cahal Milmo pens a profile on Marsha Mehran, bestselling author, noted beauty, and adamant recluse. Spending her time between exile and literature, Mehran championed her work—compulsively, mordantly—above…
Building Hagrid’s Hut
Killiechassie House, the £1.9 million Scottish estate author J.K. Rowling calls home, will gain a new addition: a circular stone hut similar to the hut that Hagrid resides in at…
Dave Eggers Gets Google-y Eyed
Dave Eggers’s upcoming novel The Circle is about a woman whose life takes a turn for the sinister after she starts work at “the world’s most powerful internet company” with its “towering…
Patrons and Propaganda
Michelangelo had the Medicis; Jackson Pollock had the CIA. It’s true—in order to ensure the US kept up with the Soviet Union culturally and artistically, the CIA funded abstract expressionist…
Rebel Muses
Famous female literary muses Zelda Fitzgerald, Louise Joyce, and Vivienne Eliot were more than just the apple of their respective husbands’ and fathers’ eye. It turns out they were also…
Arundhati Roy’s Political Writing
What has Arundhati Roy been up to since her 1997 Booker Prize for The God of Small Things? This piece answers that, exploring Roy’s current writings on India’s Maoist rebels.…
Time for a Digital Diet?
Anybody feeling the “encroachment of the buzz,” the multitudinous distractions that prevent us from concentrating on a book? Johann Hari is offering survival tips for these distracting times. “A book…