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The head of the New Yorker fact-checking department, Peter Canby, moderated the "Discussion Among Writers" with Hari Kunzru, Peter Carey, and Gary Shteyngart, on the subject of "Outlaws." It was a less freewheeling session than the one in the same space an hour earlier . Canby's questions tended to be feature lengthy quotations from the writers' works. And there was less crosstalk, the responses conforming...
Uh oh . . . the fur is flying in the literary world. The head of the jury for the Nobel Literature Prize has declared American authors to be too insular and ignorant' to be considered for this esteemed award. Horace Engdahl has deemed that Europe is still the centre of the literary world. Cue [...]
Shortly after Teen Vogue kicked off a "street style" contest on their website last month, the opportunity was posted on a "Lolita" fashion forum and the contest quickly became inundated with girls dressed in stereotypical Lolita style. Puffy caroline skirts, sweet mary jane flats, and bow-adorned headbands were popping up on page after page and [...]
Benjamin Chambers writes: The American Library Association is celebrating banned books this week. Trust the Brits to come through with élan, by which I mean they've created a quiz , about which, more anon. High time, I thought, for Emdashes to create a quiz of its own: which New Yorker authors have been banned most often? Top of the list would have to be J.D. Salinger, for Catcher in the Rye (which...
From The Telegraph: Compiling a list of the 50 Greatest Villains in Literature, without too much recourse to comics and children's books, proved trickier than we'd imagined - but gosh it was fun. It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature...
I am a sucker for lists and “best of” compilations, even if they can be somewhat annoying and … well, wrong. This weekend, Britain’s Daily Telegraph gang were at it again, assembling a rundown of what they think are the 50 über villains from literature. Naturally, crime-fiction bad guys feature heavily in the list. The Telegraph remarks: It’s perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it
If you are not sure about what you could celebrate when drinking a beer tonight (it’s Friday, after all), there’s quite a nice occasion for you today - birthday of our beloved smiley face. 26 years ago, on September 19th, 1982, Scott Fahlman, computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested using 3 symbols - colon, hyphen and a closing bracket - to mark a smiling face in a typed text to...
I am a person who dwells in discomfort. I look askance at happiness. It’s an alien land. I mistrust the easy, the normal, the enjoyable and the sane. I am, at heart, both a misanthrope and a masochist. Perhaps for...
Russian literature is rich in examples of famous writers whose wives have acted as unpaid secretaries and copyists. Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and (I suspect) Alexander Solzhenistyn. But Vera Slonim, who married Vladimir Nabokov, took the tradition to unprecedented extremes. They met as Russian exiles in Berlin in 1923 - both dispossessed of fortunes - and she gave up the rest of her life to...
"He pulled off the glove with a final yank and threw it awkwardly at Berg. The glove slapped against the wall and dropped into the washstand pitcher. "Good shot", said Berg." Vladimir Nabokov, "An Affair of Honour," 1927
Note: This is #39 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008. Well, how to describe Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov? Those in touch with popular culture may know that this book is about a Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who is educated, European, dapper, and a pedophile...
In a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, one of the characters quietly watches an elderly street woman sip a cup of coffee given to her and in that moment becomes... "aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me , the blissful bond between me and all of creation; and I realized that joy... breathed around me everywhere , in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically...
I just found out that @benjamin_spock is following me on Twitter. I’m getting the feeling that I’m being sucked in to an Alternate Twitterverse generated by Mad Men. About two dozen new Twitterers have followed me over the last couple of weeks, and the majority of them have been characters from Mad Men. At first it [...]
One of our British readers turned us on to this post by the Guardian, noting that they took a page from our general playbook. The post features 50 of the best YouTube clips from across the arts, some of which we’ve featured here before. Here you’ll find vintage performances by John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, [...] ShareThis
