November 2011
96 posts
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“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before...”
– P. G. Wodehouse (via theparisreview)
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“..the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an...”
– Happy Birthday Mark Twain! Context: Some librarians were agitated about Eve’s Diary, Twain’s fictitious first-person diary written by the first woman.
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Top Five Books No One Wants This Christmas
Main Line Broken: Why The Growing Rift Between Quakers and Unitarian Universalists Threatens The Future of Pennsylvania
1,001 Things You Lack the Motivation to Do Before You Die
Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the Government is Lying to you About 9/11: How to Go on the Offensive During the Inevitable Christmas Dinner Argument with your Drunk Uncle (Foreword by Aaron McGruder)
...
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The Genius of Arthur Conan Doyle
From The Awl: “Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of The Impudent Scholars” by Jenny Hendrix:
Doyle’s genius, as Stefan Kanfer wrote in Time on Holmes’s 1987 Centennial, “was in creating a person not so different from ourselves—then splitting him in half. One part is a fallible, well-meaning soul who works at a job, wages the battle of instincts vs. ethics and sometimes goes wrong....
Table of Contents | The Norton Reader, 13th ed →
fernham:
coming soon….the new essays (in bold) are awesome!!!
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: November 28,...
“For almost as long as there have been rights, there have been misgivings, cavils, critiques, and outright attacks on the idea of rights.” Universal Rights Down to Earth by Richard Thompson Ford
“Sprung, the wild-oat seed cocks a grasshopper leg, and another corkscrews into a heavy sock, too thick for summer.” Jam Tree Gully: Poems by John Kinsella
“There are...
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A Short History of the Apple
The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days. —Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929
Teeth at the skin. Anticipation. Then flesh. Grain on the tongue. Eve’s knees ground in the dirt of paradise. Newton watching gravity happen. The history of apples in each starry core, every papery chamber’s bright bitter seed....
“We shall see where this goes, but in the meantime the Via Meadia advice to...”
– Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia
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Confederate Plot to Burn Down NYC
Thwarted on November 25 1864. The New York Times reported:
The diabolical plot to burn the City of New-York, published yesterday morning, proves to be far more extensive than was at first supposed. It has already proved to the entire satisfaction of the authorities, that the affair was planned by the rebels and has been in preparation for a long time past, the men selected to perform the...
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Home For Thanksgiving
The gathering family throws shadows around us, it is the late afternoon Of the family. There is still enough light to see all the way back, but at the windows that light is wasting away. Soon we will be nothing but silhouettes: the sons’ as harsh as the fathers’. Soon the daughters will take off their aprons as trees take off their leaves for winter. Let us eat quickly— let us...
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It's Called Gratitude
W.W. Norton is thankful for the people who write our books, sell our books, and read our books.
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“I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps...”
– Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander
The Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin Series Available Digitally on 12/5
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Feast
—Let me taste the kitchen in your skin.
Now that company’s gone & the kids are tucked in, let the real feasting begin.
Let me lay you out on the bed like a spread of bone
china.—Yes, I want a piece of you. Yes, I do.
Give me your garlic, and the sting of your pepper.
The plenty of your hair (cinnamon, cardamom).
Here a hint of coffee, & ...
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“The bad lover, like the bad poet, perhaps because of a preoccupation with self,...”
– Stephen Dunn, Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs
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“…just as the universe itself moves irresistibly toward equilibrium,...”
– Joshua Cody, [sic]
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Patrick O'Brian, I Love You But You're Bringing Me...
“‘An ill-looking parcel of bastards,’ he reflected, seeing a bailiff in every full-grown man. ‘But my God, what a life. Doing this everyday, cooped up with a ledger—what a life.’ The cheerless faces went by, hurrying to their dismal work, an endless wet, anxious, cold, grey-yellow stream of people, jostling, pushing past one another like an ugly dream, with here...
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What's So Great About Patrick O'Brian's...
Fantasy writer Jo Walton on Tor.com:
The thing that’s so great about these books isn’t that they’re historically accurate and give a picture of the whole planet at the turn of the nineteenth century. They certainly do that, but if that were all I wouldn’t get homesick for them. It’s not the character portrait of the two very different central men—bluff, good-natured Jack Aubrey with his...
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“Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country,...”
– Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander
The Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin Series Available Digitally on 12/5
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The Paris Review on Patrick O'Brian
“In our bizarre age of masquerade and mammon, of footlights and flashbulbs, of tabloids and television, O’Brian seems extraordinary: he is his own man, he does his work, he values history, the arts and sciences, morality. He lives on good terms with his neighbor and with Homer, with the birds in his garden and with Mozart, with his readers and with Lennaeus. He is surely ‘one of...
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This Just In: Patrick O'Brian's Acclaimed... →
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First Lines from New Books Out Today: November 21,...
“Science has advanced to the point where we can precisely arrange individual atoms on a metal surface or identify people’s continents of ancestry by analyzing the DNA contained in their hair. And yet ironically we lack a scientific understanding of how sentences in a book refer to atoms, DNA, or anything at all. This is a serious problem.” Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged...
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After Catullus
A penknife engraved first your name, then his, then a heart around them with a wedded plus, then an X across it all— the drawn out chronicle of your last uncontested crush still knuckling over twenty years later in the backyard of your parents’ house. For as I learned this evening, it was your crossed heart that broke, not his, and so made romance into something fleshed,...
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“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry...”
– Adrienne Rich, Someone is Writing a Poem
“Fueled by righteous—some would say self-righteous—outrage at the injustices he...”
– From Don Ohlmeyer’s review of Mark Ribowsky’s HOWARD COSELL: The Man, The Myth, and Transformation of American Sports
Best of #junkfoodnovels (so far)
The Dairie Queene
How Green Was My Slurpee
The Sound and The McFlurry
The Four ButterFingers of Death
A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Manwich
Skittlemarch
Remains of the Danish
Where The Mild Wings Are
There are too many outstanding entries to count, and with Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie participating the bar is high. Jump in here.
#junkfoodnovels →
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Was Caravaggio a Pimp?
“Well, that would be the advantage of being a pimp would be that—you know, it may well be that—I’m pretty positive that Caravaggio slept with Fillide. I mean, it seems highly likely that he did. The paintings that he does of her are charged with sexual feeling. He was also sexually attracted to men and almost certainly having sex with men…he is omni-sexual, if you like. But the...
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's advice to Hemingway
“You know the very fact that people have committed themselves to you will make them watch you like a cat & if they don’t like it creep away like one.”
-from Hemingway: The Homecoming by Michael Reynolds
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I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — Ask Me Anything →
“Made of amazing.” We’re now adding that to Neil’s official author bio on his next book.
braiker:
This man is made of amazing.
david:
If you could impress one thing on young people today, what would it be?
That adults are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of them are wrong most of the time. This can be quite revelatory for a kid - often launching them on a...
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“And finally, a nod to Lucretius. His ‘On the Nature of Things’ is...”
– From Norton President W. Drake McFeely’s note to the staff on THE SWERVE winning the National Book Award in non-fiction.
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“I find myself fighting back tears… partly because of the acceptance speech...”
– from Stephen Greenblatt’s National Book Award acceptance speech
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The Swerve: National Book Award Winner
Congratulations to Stephen Greenblatt, winner of the National Book Award in non-fiction, for THE SWERVE.
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