Jewish Texts Lost in WWII Found Again

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times.

From the article...

In the tumult of war, great chunks of the collection vanished. Now, librarians an ocean away have determined that most of the missing titles have been sitting for years on the crowded shelves of the Leo Baeck Institute, a Manhattan center dedicated to preserving German Jewish culture.

The story of how the hundreds of tattered, cloth-bound books with esoteric German titles ended up in New York includes impossible escapes, careful scholarship and some very heavy suitcases. And while the exact trails of many of the volumes remain murky, they wind through book-lined apartments on the Upper West Side, across a 97-year-old woman’s cluttered coffee table and into a library’s cavernous stacks.

For Jewish scholars, the collection of Science of Judaism texts (in German, Wissenschaft des Judentums) is a touchstone marking the emergence of Jewish tradition as a philosophy and culture worthy of academic study.

The 20 Science Fiction Books That Will Save Your Life

The list, care of io9.

Making Books in 1947

Gatsby Mansion Doomed

The inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's home in "The Great Gatsby" will be nothing but a memory soon.

From a piece in Newsday...

Now, the front door is off its hinges, wood floors have been torn up for salvage, windows are missing and the two-story Doric columns are unsteady.

Sands Point Village in January approved plans to raze the house and divide the site into lots for five custom homes starting at $10 million each.

Lands End is the latest Gold Coast estate to fall. With each demolition, the North Shore loses more of its gilded past, when sea breezes and social events attracted the rich and famous. Historians say hundreds of the mansions have been lost in the past 50 years as owners faced increasing taxes and high maintenance costs.

"The cost to renovate these things is just so overwhelming that people aren't interested in it," said Clifford Fetner, president of Jaco Builders in Hauppauge and Lands End project construction manager. "The value of the property is the land."

The David Foster Wallace Death Industry

The New York Observer takes note of how a dead author is making big money.

From the article...

The death of the author, it would seem, has changed all that. Next month will see the publication of The Pale King, the unfinished novel Wallace left stacked in a pile in his garage. This comes on the heels of two other posthumous books in the 30 months since his passing: This Is Water, a 4,000-word commencement address he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, which was stretched to book length by the neat trick (one critic termed it "un-Wallace-like") of printing only one sentence per page; and Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis, padded with a number of essays by distinguished philosophers.

We have not heard the last of him. Indeed, the 34 document boxes and eight oversize folders of Wallace's drafts, letters and juvenilia deposited at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, along with 300 books from his personal library, promise a posthumous flow that will be, if not infinite, then certainly robust. There may be another book of unpublished fiction soon in the offing, and one of uncollected nonfiction, as well as potentially two books of Wallace's letters, one of which is said to be devoted almost entirely to his correspondence about the art of writing.

Then there are Wallace's Boswells. David Lipsky, who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to shadow the author on the Infinite Jest book tour (the piece was killed), last year re-purposed his transcripts of their road trip into a 300-page book, And of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. D.T. Max, who wrote a feature-length obituary of Wallace for The New Yorker framing Wallace's suicide as the end of a long struggle against both depression and avant-garde tendencies, is expanding his efforts into a full-blown literary biography slated to appear later this year.

Amazing Fantasy Sells for Amazing Amount of Money

Art Daily takes note of a recent auction in which a Spider-Man comic sold for over $1 million.

From the post...

The issue, first published in 1962, was sold Monday by a private seller to a private buyer, ComicConnect.com chief executive Stephen Fishler told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

It's not the highest price ever paid for a comic book, an honor that goes to "Action Comics" No. 1 with Superman on the cover, which went for $1.5 million.

But Fishler says the price paid is the most for a book from the Silver Age, the mid-1950s to about 1970.

"The fact that a 1962 comic has sold for $1.1 million is a bit of a record-shattering event," he said. "That something that recent can sell for that much and be that valuable is awe-inspiring."

Usually, it has been comics from the Golden Age — typically from the late 1930s to the early 1950s — that draw seven-figure sums.

Frank Frazetta's Eerie Covers

Enjoy!

Harry Potter Movie Set Tours Coming Soon

Guillermo del Toro Takes on H.P. Lovecraft

io9 discusses a coming movie, potentially starring Tom Cruise.

UPDATE: Or, then again, perhaps not? The New Yorker has more, here.

When it Comes to Non-White Characters in Fiction, Is it Better to Be Stereotyped, Tokenized, or Erased?

That's the question recently posed by Psychology Today.

From the article...

Harris invited several other race bloggers to chime in and part of the blog post's charm is the many varied perspectives. For example, Racialicious blogger Latoya Peterson hated all three options but ultimately took a stand against erasure.

"I think there are more than enough all white worlds already," she wrote, "losing the tokens just contributes to our overall erasure. Remember, out of sight, out of mind. And we all know how that goes down, season after season."

As someone who often writes about racial dynamics in the media, Peterson's words resonate loudly. From this particular perspective (as a race scholar/activist), there is nothing worse than erasure, because it doesn't allow any kind of meaningful analysis or discussion beyond "Can you believe there were no people of color in the show/book/film?"

Book Dominos

Youth Speak and Street Slang in Novels

Stephen Kelman's feted first novel is told largely through youth speech and street slang. Arifa Akbar talks to him and other writers to explore the vernacular tradition in literary fiction, care of the Independent.

From the article...

Its critical success aside, slang narratives continue to raise debate over what is seen, and sometimes claimed, as a more authentic mode of storytelling, delivered from the apparently unfiltered subjectivities of children and working-class or immigrant margins, and whose speech patterns suggest a closer verisimilitude to the "true" cadences of the street. Yet writers have also, paradoxically, referred to the high levels of artifice inherent in this medium.

Stephen Kelman sought to give his child voice authentic grounding by borrowing from the social reality around him; the geography of his fictional housing estate is the same as the one on which he grew up in Luton (where he continues to live). Some of the peripheral characters are hybrid creations from his own childhood (including an aggressive dog named Asbo) and he recorded the colourful vocabulary of the local teenagers in his neighbourhood to capture the voice of his central character, Harrison Opoku, an 11-year -old immigrant from Ghana.

"I felt from the beginning his voice was authentic. He arrived on my shoulder whispering in my ear," says Stephen Kelman. "There are Ghanaian people around me on the estate. I kept an open ears policy to the words being used around me. Ghanaian slang is very exuberant and cheerful. I'd be on the bus and I'd listen to how the children talked and I'd put it in the book."

The Letterpress iPad App

Wait...what?! The letterpress iPad app? Sounds crazy enough to work.

From an article in the Faster Times...

Graphic designer and wood type enthusiast John Bonadies has created a “virtual letterpress environment” to be released for the iPad. He calls it LetterMpress, and you can use it to mix colors, set type as you would on a real press—meaning that the letters appear backwards in the press bed—and store your designs in digital galley trays. And yeah, you can even export these “prints” directly to your LaserJet to be copied effortlessly while you sit around admiring your perfectly manicured, ink free, fingernails. Damn you look good!

Bonadies plans to include 12 typefaces and 50 art “cuts” for the first version of LetterMpress. The way the software reproduces that good old fashioned aesthetic—uneven ink distribution, funky textures, and idiosyncratic detailing—is by manipulating scans of real wood type impressions. At a later stage, LetterMpress users will be able to get actual letterpress prints custom made from their designs by typesetters working with the growing collection at Living Letter Press, a co-op Bonadies has founded in Champaign, Illinois, which will serve as a resource for designers, artists, and students.

Rescued from the Bonfire, the Lost Work of C.S. Lewis

The Independent has the story of a previously thought lost C.S. Lewis translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

From the story...

The translation was believed to have been lost in a bonfire in 1964, a year after the author's death. Now, nearly 50 years later, it has resurfaced. The work was apparently rescued by Lewis's former secretary, Walter Hooper, 79. The complete translation is to be published in the book CS Lewis's Lost Aeneid, which is out next month.

"Although it had been known that Lewis had worked on this translation, no one realised that portions still survived until Walter began sifting through his material," said the book's editor, Andy Reyes. "The bonfire, it was assumed, had consumed the most significant fragments of Lewisiana."

Startling Comics

A gallery, care of Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Charlie Sheen Reads Charlie Sheen's Poetry

On Being an Only Child

Geoff Dyer has a great essay in the Threepenny Review about his childhood and discovering reading and writing.

From the piece...

It was natural, since I didn’t have to share my toys with any siblings, that I became a collector. I collected all sorts of cards, Airfix soldiers, and comics. I loved arranging my things—whatever they were—and putting them into some kind of order. I still love doing this. I spent much of my time making model airplanes and doing jigsaws: things that you can do on your own. (My mother had a particular way of doing jigsaws: we sorted out the side pieces and made a hollow, unstable frame, then filled in the middle. Our approach to jigsaws was, in other words, methodical, rigorous. Work had entered into every facet of my parents’ lives; even leisure activities had about them some of the qualities of labor.) I would like to say that I displayed the single child’s customary ability to develop a rich imaginative life, but I don’t think I did—unless finding ways to play games intended for two or more players on your own counts as imaginative. In my late thirties I bought a flat in Brighton, on the south coast of England. It was a big place, big enough to accommodate something I’d long wanted: a ping-pong table. The problem was that I knew almost no one in Brighton, and except on weekends when friends from London visited, I had no one to play with. It took me right back to my childhood, that table. In its immense, folded uselessness it symbolized all the afternoons I spent playing games on my own. I played Subbuteo on my own—almost impossible, since you have to flick both the attacking players and control the opposing goalkeeper simultaneously. I played Monopoly on my own. I played Cluedo on my own. When I eventually got round to it, masturbation seemed the natural outcome of my childhood.

A few years after hitting upon this solitary activity, I discovered another: reading. I had passed the Eleven-plus and gone to Cheltenham Grammar School, where for the first four years I was an indifferent student. Then, at the age of about fifteen, under the influence of my English teacher, I started to do well at school and began to spend more and more time reading. I passed all my O-levels and stayed on for A-levels. During my first year at grammar school we had moved from a terraced house to a semi-detached with three bedrooms. I wonder if I would have had the peace and space to study if I had had brothers and sisters. It’s impossible to say, but reading and study filled the vacuum of boredom that had been there for as long as I could remember. But reading created a gap as well as filling one.

When I was trying to decide which A-levels to do, my father said not to bother with history because it was all in the past. He also gave me another piece of advice that I have come particularly to cherish: “Never put anything in writing.”

An Anti-Slavery Manifesto from 1829

The Huffington Post takes note of a new acquisition by the University of Virginia.

From the piece...

The University of Virginia has acquired a rare first edition of an 1829 anti-slavery manifesto that was considered a rallying cry for black Americans and a major threat to Southern leaders, who worked vigorously to ban it.

The copy of abolitionist David Walker's "Appeal in Four Articles; Together With a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America" is one of seven known to still exist. The pamphlet is on display at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

A private endowment for U.Va.'s special collections recently acquired it from a New Jersey rare-book dealer for $95,000, university officials said Thursday.

Picture Book Timeline

Enjoy it, care of picturingbooks.com.

What Is Experimental Literature?

That's the question recently asked by Danielle Dutton on HTML Giant.

From the piece...

Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding. How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”? Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland, “What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”

Last night on the phone my dad and I were talking about fundamentalisms and the possible future explosion of the planet. He was saying how important it is do be able to dwell in doubt, to assume you don’t know it all, to embrace “the fertile void.” He said, “Certainty is for shit,” which, despite the fact that we were talking about the possible future explosion of the planet, made me feel a bit better about the fact that I really don’t know how to answer this question.

So in the spirit of uncertainty I offer Robbe-Grillet’s idea that “[a]ll writers believe they are realists. . . . each has different ideas about reality. The classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal. . . . Each speaks of the world as he sees it, but no one sees it in the same way.” For some reason, this was one of the first things that popped into my head when I read your question, Chris. Right or wrong, I’ve always thought of this notion as particularly sane. When I first read For a New Novel, I put a little star beside it in the margin; it made good sense to me, perhaps especially because at the same time I was studying Virginia Woolf. For Woolf, stream-of-consciousness writing—a literary experiment if ever there was one—was closer to reality on the page than realism. Of course, this isn’t how many of her readers and critics took the new style, and in fielding some of their criticisms of her work, I appreciated Robbe-Grillet’s peculiar articulation of realism, his defense of the “experimental.” Or, at least, the seemingly non-realist. The thing is, you can’t really point to something and say it’s Experimental with a capital “e.” Rather than a clearly defined category or concept, such as surrealism, “experimental” is an umbrella term under which many, many different styles of writing (and kinds of writers) can hang out (or be forced into) together. I suppose it’s generally thought that “experimental” writing is writing that experiments with (plays with, fucks with, risks) form . . . surely this means different things to different people. Mostly I think “experimental” is a watery sort of term, sweeping, more connotative than denotative, having to do with undertones, implications, context.

Harry Potter Quiz

Good luck!

Doctorow's "The March" Marching to the Stage

Steppenwolf Theater Company is Chicago is to mount a production of E.L. Doctorow's prize-winning Civil War novel about General Sherman's march to the sea.

From an article in the New York Times...

Mr. Galati is writing the script of “The March” and will also direct the production, which is scheduled to run April 5-June 10, 2012. Like the award-winning 2005 novel, the play renders Sherman’s march through the South during the final months of the Civil War, as told by a range of characters — Union and Confederate soldiers, slaves and free men, women of various life stations, and, at the center of it all, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

The actor and Steppenwolf ensemble member William Petersen (best known from his years as Gil Grissom on the CBS series “CSI”) will play Sherman. Among the other actors in the production will be Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s artistic director, who will play Mrs. Sherman and several other minor roles.

In the two decades since “The Grapes of Wrath,” Mr. Galati has written stage adaptations of William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and Haruki Murakami’s novels “Kafka on the Shore” and “After the Quake.” On Broadway he directed the 1998 original musical production of “Ragtime,” based on another work of historical fiction by Mr. Doctorow (that script was written by Terrence McNally) as well as the musicals “Seussical” and “The Pirate Queen.”

Abraham Lincoln's Inaugural Address - 150 Years On

Reader's Almanac looks back at Lincoln's speech.

From the post...

As Abraham Lincoln stepped forward to deliver his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, he certainly had cause to reflect on the course he was about to take. Washington D. C. resembled an armed camp as rumors flew that the new president would be the target of violence. General Winfield Scott’s troops, complete with cavalry and sharpshooters on the roofs of buildings, lined the short parade route. The president-elect had spent the last days in a different sort of warfare, wrangling over who would join his cabinet. Now it was time to speak to a divided nation and set forth a policy that was firm but not threatening, that sought peace without making concessions.

Lincoln had not always fared well in his remarks to waiting crowds as he made his way from Springfield to Washington. He had cut an embarrassing figure when, to avoid the possibility of assassination in Baltimore, he slipped into the capital in disguise. The document that he had initially composed in Springfield (and which, at one point on the trip, had been carelessly mislaid by his eldest son, Robert) he had revised in response to suggestions that it was too defiant, too confrontational. Half of its writing had indeed been in the rewriting; its composition reflected Lincoln’s willingness to listen to his supporters and advisers at a moment of impending crisis.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - The Movie

The Los Angeles Times discusses the coming movie.

From the article...

It was a bestselling book that's now a highly anticipated movie, but can "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," a story that has the 16th president exacting revenge on the vampires who killed members of his family, also be a teaching tool?

Anthony Mackie, who stars in next year's Fox film opposite Benjamin Walker, says the tale will contain plenty of nutritional value. "It's not so much fictional as it is a recontextualization of history," Mackie, who plays Lincoln valet and friend William Johnson, told 24 Frames. "There are actual moments and things that happened in the annals of time. Abraham Lincoln's friend William Johnson really was a freed man of color."

Like Seth Grahame-Smith's book, the movie -- which will be directed by Timur Bekmambetov and produced by Tim Burton -- assumes the existence of vampires in the 19th century as the nation was on the brink of Civil War. As the story progresses, we learn that the creatures have a sinister investment in keeping slavery legal. Lincoln's personal animus toward the vampires for what they did to his family drives him to hunt them down, a crusade he continues even from the White House as he pursues an abolitionist agenda.

Charlie Sheen's Poetry

For reals, care of GQ.

How to Publish a Book

The Shadowy Writer Edward Gorey Is Having His Day in the Sun

Edward Gorey (one of my favorite writers) is getting popular, several years after his death.

From a piece in the New York Times...

Opinions differ about why Gorey — whose name increasingly serves as shorthand for a postmodern twist on the gothic that crosses irony, high camp and black comedy — is casting a longer shadow these days. Mr. Handler attributes Gorey’s growing popularity partly to the sophisticated understatement of his hand-cranked world, a sensibility that stands out sharply against the exuberant vulgarity of our age of jeggings, “Bridalplasty” and “Jackass 3D.” “That worldview — that a well-timed scathing remark might shame an uncouth person into acting better — seems worthy to me,” Mr. Handler said.

Undoubtedly such romanticized visions of a more decorous, dapper past, which also inform the neo-Victorian and neo-Edwardian street styles of goths and steampunks, have as much to do with escapism as historical fact. But accurately or not, such subcultures see in Gorey’s work an invitation “to return to a time of gentility,” to quote the promoters of the annual Edwardian Ball, a celebration of Gorey.

In contrast, some fashion designers see Gorey’s anachronistic use of historical references as perfect for our age of mash-ups and remixes. The neo-Victorian couturier Kambriel, whose shows have featured Gorey-inspired sets and models reciting Gorey limericks, said that in her designs, as in Gorey’s tales, “the propriety of the past” is infused with the “playful mischief and irreverence” of the present.

Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?

That's the question recently asked in the New York Times.

From the article...

That’s why you’ve never read “Fountain City,” just as you’ve never read John Updike’s “Willow,” Junot Díaz’s “Dark America” or Jennifer Egan’s “Inland Souls” — all abandoned by their authors after years of toil and piles of pages. Chabon, though, has recently published the first four chapters of “Fountain City” in the literary magazine McSweeney’s, complete with annotations that in turn bemoan and belittle the book that stole so much of his life before he put his misery out of its misery.

Why would a novel be, in Chabon’s parlance, “wrecked”? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her “Twilight” spinoff “Midnight Sun,” which she declared herself “too sad” to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, “The Temple at Thatch,” and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of “Dead Souls II,” for the second time.

Billy Joel Releasing Tell-All Memoir

CBS takes note that the world-famous singer is to write a memoir.

From the piece...

This undated image provided by HarperCollins shows the cover of Billy Joel's "The Book of Joel" coming out June 14, 2011. (AP Photo/HarperCollins)

“The Book Of Joel” — which will be released on June 14 — will take fans on an “emotional ride,” publisher HarperCollins announced Thursday.

The six-time Grammy Award winner will cover everything from the writing of hit songs “Just the Way You Are” and “New York State of Mind” to his broken marriage to Christie Brinkley and his struggles with depression and substance abuse.

Editor David Hirshey said in a statement that “there is a lot in this book that he has never revealed before.”

I am curious if he will discuss his time on "Sesame Street" singing a duet with Marlee Matlin:

The Crisis of Manhood

Man up! Man down! From every angle, it seems, men are being told they're doing it all wrong. Is it any wonder they're confused? Jessica Bennett writes on the male identity crisis for the Daily Beast.

From the story...

Dear men: We're sorry to break this to you, but you're pretty much screwed. In decline, to be exact. Unnecessary, as The Atlantic put it—and overwhelmingly, the victims of the current "Mancession."

We are being facetious, of course. (You're totally not screwed.) But the crisis of manhood has become something of an obsession these days, with belligerent, contradictory, nonstop messages bombarding from every angle. Over the past six months, dozens of articles have used the word "mancession" to describe the current economic downturn. "Retrosexual" has replaced "metrosexual" to describe a breed of über-masculine fashionistos (clad in $300 flannel shirts). And just in case you weren't already confused, there are now three more books to add to the mix, with three more messages to add to your masculinity melting pot.

March Book-To-Film Movie Trailers

Enjoy quite a few of them, care of Booklicious.

You can see one, "The Lincoln Lawyer," below...

The Rarest of Pleasures

The Wall Street Journal drools over Bauman Rare Books and their catalog.

From the article...

There's hardcore porn and softcore porn, and then there's the Bauman Rare Books catalog, which lands on my doorstep several times a year. If your heart races at the contours of a first edition of "The Great Gatsby," with the almost impossible to find dust jacket, or an autographed copy of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," then the Bauman catalog is the equivalent of Playboy, Penthouse and maybe the New York Review of Books all rolled into one.

Women of Science Comic Books

Bravo, Smithsonian. They're putting out a series of comic books based on real-life female scientists.

From a post on Comics Alliance...

Because teachers are the real heroes, the Smithsonian Channel has launched a new series spotlighting some of the world's greatest scientists and their fascinating work. The hook? They're all women -- superheroines of discovery and exploration. In support of Women in Science, Smithsonian Channel commissioned five short webcomics starring the esteemed subjects of the series, which include such tantalizing titles as "Decoding Immortality," "Batwomen of Panama," and "Ghost Cat." Check out more details below.

The heroic roster of Women in Science includes Nobel Prize-winner Elisabeth Blackburn, whose mission to "Decode Immortality" leads to the discovery a mysterious enzyme that can keep cells young - but with potentially deadly consequences.

Romance in the Stacks

The newest trend at your public library? The New York Times reports that it's speed dating.

From the article...

Can “Atlas Shrugged” find love with the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”? Is attraction possible between a Jonathan Franzen reader and a die-hard Elizabeth Gilbert fan?

Those are the types of questions librarians are starting to field. In a kind of hearts-and-flowers literacy drive, public libraries across the country are sponsoring speed-date nights to draw more young professionals into reading rooms.

In Fort Collins, Colo., librarians strung white lights and scattered rose petals for two date nights last fall. The main library in Sacramento recently hosted its second event. Libraries in Chattanooga, Tenn., Piscataway, N.J., and Omaha all held soirees for Valentine’s Day last month.

“The library wants to be a gathering place that is relevant to younger people,” said Donya Drummond, the reference librarian who promoted the San Francisco event, mostly through Facebook. “We had more people than we knew what to do with.”

Archie Comics #1

How much do you think it went for at auction? Quite a bit.

From a piece on Art Daily...

"Archie may have a ways to go to catch the likes of Superman and Batman, his Golden Age counterparts," said Lon Allen, Managing Director of Comics at Heritage, "but you can bet that collectors sat up and took notice when this comic brought that price. This amount exceeds the priciest of Spidey and Hulk comic books we've sold, which brought in excess of $125,000 each."

In fact, George Pantela of GPAnalysis (which tracks all sales of CGC-certified comics), has confirmed that this is the highest price ever paid for a non-superhero comic book. It sold to a West Coast collector who chose not to be identified by name.

"I've been collecting Archies for 40 years," the collector said, "and over the years I've become much more selective as far as condition. I've been looking for a high-grade Archie #1 for some time, and this is the first I've come across that I'd feel good about owning. It's not going to leave my possession until I die."

Stephen King Takes on the Kennedy Assassination

The news, by way of Media Bistro, is that Stephen King is to publish a time travel novel.

From the post...

“Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program … Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.”

ESPN Magazine Does Fiction?

Yup, with some help from our friends at McSweeney's.

From a piece in the New Yorker...

With the help of McSweeney’s, ESPN The Magazine has amassed in its Fiction Issue nine stories and five “What-If’s,” the latter being exercises which ask you to imagine that Tom Brady isn’t special or that Pat Tillman didn’t die. (Perhaps these can be blamed on the fact that Fantasy Football is shut down until next September, thereby depriving those imaginative sports fans of a less pretentious, less public creative outlet.) As for the stories, they’re all connected, however tangentially, with athletic endeavor. Among the more notable authors are Wells Tower, Dave Eggers, John Brandon, and Miguel Batista, a sixteen-year M.L.B. veteran who’s also published a book of poetry and a novel.

The stories cover a wide range of sports-related concerns, from blue-chip college recruitment to Olympian feats as achieved by flabby weekend warriors. Each is not without its high points, but collectively the stories can’t help but feel a bit bloodless, like commissioned projects in which the prose is subordinate to theme. That being said, it was generous of ESPN to throw fiction a bone, even if it comes during what is probably the slowest sports-watching period of the year (football is finished; baseball hasn’t started; college basketball is yet to the point of filling out brackets; professional basketball could conceivably not name a champion until June 17th; and Hockey, well, let’s be serious). So, until the next great clash of rivals, be content, ESPN says, with this helping of stuff made-up.

The Ten Most Magical Characters in the DC Universe

The list, care of MTV.

From the piece...

Felix Faust (pictured above)

As you might guess, Felix is basically Doctor Faustus in comic book form… Which means he usually will strike some sort of deal, and often with a devil. He has massive reality altering powers, and mostly acts like an a-hole. He’s barely appeared in the DC Universe continuity, but whenever he does, he makes a huge impact, like killing beloved character Ralph Dibny.

Shackleton's Antarctica - In Color

The photo gallery, care of How To Be a Retronaut, are Frank Hurley’s famous early colour photographs of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ‘Endurance’ voyage, as part of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1917. Hurley was the official photographer on the expedition.

The Guardian's New Children's Book Website

Enjoy!

Graphic Novels for Kids Makes Comics More Accessible to All

Wired celebrates kiddy comics.

From the story...

Reading comic books is fairly intimidating if you don’t get into it until later in life. There is this huge mythos surrounding it all. So many people are “in the know” about all the characters, such as the Marvel universe versus the DC universe (I couldn’t tell you which superhero is in which), that you feel like the person at the gym who never goes to the gym. What are all these machines for? How do I use them? One visit is all it takes and then you run away, ashamed of your ignorance, thinking everyone can tell.

I’m a comic book newbie. I never got into comic books when I was a kid, unlike many of the other GeekDad contributors. I have read a handful of comics in my life, but never anything significant. My life has not really been the worse for it, but I do feel a distinct absence of knowledge in that area.

Enter the library. My kids and I recently discovered that our local library has graphic novels for kids. Perhaps they have them for grownups, too, but we spend almost all our time in the kids’ area so I wouldn’t know. I skipped over the Disney ones and found masterpieces such as Owly and T-Minus: The Race to the Moon. My kids grabbed Johnny Boo and Otto’s Orange Day. And after several visits to the library to see their entire (but very small) collection, I got hooked. Now I check out the kid graphic novel section on almost every library visit to see if there is anything new.

A Novel, One Lamppost at a Time

The New York Post is reporting a New York writer is serializing his novel by places pages on lampposts.

From the story...

There's a mystery unfolding in the East Village.

An unknown writer is serializing his or her new whodunit on the neighborhood's streets, posting each page on a different lamppost.

Although the direction of the plot is difficult to make sense of at this point, given the quirky publishing platform, the book, titled "Holy Crap," appears to concern a narrator who just became a parent.

"No. No thank you. Um, no," begins Page 7, which was left on a lamppost at Seventh Street and First Avenue. "Then the baby is on a chest. She is wrapped in a white blanket with green trim."

The narrator, who could be either male or female, is told by a nurse: "Most babies aren't beautiful when they are born. It takes about a month to get cute. But your baby is beautiful. The most beautiful baby."

The scene in the maternity ward ends on an ominous note.

Vampires in Iran

From a piece in Iran Book News...

Meet the vampires" is the 2nd volume of an Iranian novel collection named "Vampires". Siamak Golshiri has authored the books for young adults.

The book is a sequence of the 1st volume entitled "Tehran, the alley of ghosts" which is about the appearance of Dracula in Tehran.

"Tehran, the alley of ghosts" is about a teenage boy who enters a mysterious house which holds a horrific history. "A family used to live in the house. One night the father gets mad and slaughters his children and wife and then kills himself."

Now the teenager in "Meet the vampires" searches the house: "I saw the ghost's house; it was how the Dracula described it in "Tehran, the alley of ghosts…"

If you are a fan of horror stories and are curious in Tehran's Dracula you can read "Meet the vampires".

20 Best Short Stories of 2010

The list, care of Falcon vs. Monkey.

John Marshall's Book Sphere

Found at the Minnesota Center for Book Art.

Inside Andrew Lloyd Webber's Coming "Wizard of Oz"

The Guardian has some pictures, here.

Justice is Blind

Booktryst celebrates justice.

From the piece...

The personification of Lady Justice as a goddess balancing the scales of truth and fairness dates back at least to Ancient Egypt and the Goddess Maat, as shown in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Maat later morphed into the better known Isis, and was then co-opted by the Romans, who renamed her Justitia. But whatever name she is given, Lady Justice with her scales, and later her blindfold and sword, remains a beautiful and compelling figure in paintings, sculptures, and, of course, book illustrations. Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library specializes in collecting rare, illustrated law books, and has recently expanded an already fascinating online collection of images of Justitia in all her glory from it's massive collection of rare volumes.

4th Grade Reading

How are our elementary school students doing on the reading front?

From a piece on the Federal Education Budget Project...

4th grade reading proficiency varies by region.

On average, a higher percentage of 4th graders in the Northeast United States and the Midwest scored proficient or above in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2009 than in the South and the West. 1 In the Northeastern states, approximately 37 percent of 4th graders scored proficient or above in reading, while in the Southern states only 29 percent scored proficient or above. Of the 10 states with the lowest percent of 4th graders scoring proficient or above in reading, nine were located in the South or the West.

Bent Spines

An essay about back problems and book reading, care of the New York Times.

Backbone

"New" fiction by David Foster Wallace.

Is This the First Picture Ever Taken of a Surfer?

Yes. It hits the auction blocks soon. Learn more, here.

National Archives' Treasure Hunters

What goes missing, they will find. Or so they hope, anyway.

From a piece in the Washington Post about the National Archives' recovery team...

The tactic illustrates the new, more aggressive approach the Archives is taking in an effort to recover treasures that have disappeared from its holdings. Porous security and open access have allowed countless items to slip out of the Archives' 44 centers and presidential libraries, from the Washington headquarters to the Reagan Library in California.

The missing items include telegrams written by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War; the Wright brothers' patent for a flying machine; Eli Whitney's patent for the cotton gin; Lyndon Johnson's class ring from the Coast Guard; an official portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt; and target maps for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

The Ten Best Neglected Literary Classics

The list, care of the Guardian.

Why We Write About Grief

Grieving has always been a public as well as private act, and lately, it seems, people are increasingly writing memoirs about it.

From an article in the New York Times...

Joyce Carol Oates:

Writing always seems so private — I can never quite believe that anything I write, especially in longhand, on scraps of paper, which is my usual way of writing, will ever be read by anyone else!

I never set out to “write” a memoir — the book called “A Widow’s Story” is comprised of journal entries from Feb. 11, 2008, through Aug. 29, 2008. When Ray was first hospitalized, I was very anxious and excited and could not sleep well, so I wrote in the journal late at night, as I’ve been doing, though not so intensely, since the early 1970s. After Ray’s death, this was the only kind of writing that I could do, in fragments of a page or less. The act of writing — of even trying to write — of imagining to write — seemed meaningless, vain and silly.

In the summer of 2009, when I could not write fiction very readily, and was haunted by memories of a very visual nature, I gave in, in a sense, and turned to the journal entries — which I had not wanted to reread, as I certainly did not want to write a memoir — to shape into a coherent structure: what is called, so very abstractly, a “book.” In a traditional memoir, chapters are written; in this sort of composed memoir, chapters are assembled out of small journal entries, developed or expanded a bit, or edited.

The diarist doesn’t know how a scene will end, when it begins; she doesn’t know what the next hour will bring, let alone the next day or the next week; she is wholly unprepared for the most profound experience of her life — that her husband will die.

Who Owns Kafka?

That's the question posed by the London Review of Books as legal wranglings continue in regards to his papers.

From the story...

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika between 1925 and 1927. In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafka’s wish not to have it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod’s compromise with himself turned out to be consequential, and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the non-resolution of Kafka’s bequest.

Return to Oz: The Joy That Got Away

A documentary on the failed sequel of "The Wizard of Oz."