The Independent
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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 on Facebook in the hopes of encouraging reading on public…
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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 all else: What remained for her was her writing, a…
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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 Hogwarts. The summer cottage recently received approval from the local…
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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 glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend…
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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 art, unbeknownst even to the artists themselves. Read more about…
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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 hard party-ers of the Jazz Age. “The muse is traditionally…
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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. “When her essay about the trip, Walking with the Comrades,…
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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 has a different relationship to time than a TV show…