50 Best Food Memoirs

The list, care of AbeBooks.

The Only Film of Anne Frank

A Literary History of Oz

Lit Reactor goes down the yellow brick road.

From the piece...

The story most of us are familiar with is based on L. Frank Baum's first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Illustrated by W.W. Denslow, who shared the copyright, it was the nation's best-selling children's book for two years and sold more than five million copies before its copyright expired in 1956. (All of Baum's Oz books are in the public domain now, so go nuts writing a stage version featuring turtles and hand puppets or fan fiction that replaces Dorothy with a sluttier version of Agent Scully.) Those might seem like meager sales numbers in today's 100-million-plus-sold world of Twilight and Fifty Shades, but Oz's sales figures were nothing to scoff at in the early 1900s. It was, essentially, the Harry Potter of its time. 

As an inspirational aside to struggling writers who don't happen to be 22-year-old wunderkind: Note that Baum—who ultimately gave us one of the most beloved stories of all time—wrote his first book (let's not count the instructional volume on chicken rearing he put out when he was 30), at the age of forty-one. This after years spent raising fancy chickens, starting a poultry journal, running a variety store, selling fireworks, and editing a magazine about department store window displays. The first of his fourteen Oz books was published when he was 44. Baum wrote a total of fifty-five novels (fourteen Oz-related and the rest less-successful fantasy and fairy tales), more than eighty short stories (including six Little Wizard Stories Of Oz for younger readers), and an untold number of stage plays, poems, and odd tomes about stamp dealing, poultry, and decorating windows. It's never too late to chase the dream.

The Women Behind Russia's Most Famous Authors

The Moscow News takes a look.

From the piece...

Nadezhda Mandelstam's brother once commented that she and her husband - the brilliant, doomed poet Osip Mandelstam - were becoming so close that "Nadezhda" seemed no longer to exist.

"That's how we like it," she replied.

Russia's most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.

"What people know about is that Sophia copied out Tolstoy's great novels, but it was much more than that," said Alexandra Popoff, author of the 2012 book "The Wives: The Women behind Russia's Literary Giants." "They discussed things together - there was a spark. And without it, the ‘War and Peace' that the world admires wouldn't have been written."

Lena Dunham and the Girls of "Girls"

O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship

Anne Sexton Reciting Poetry

The Revolution at Your Local Library

The New Republic takes a look at libraries in our digital age.

From the piece...

Around the globe, a handful of innovative architects are forging a new building type with a deceptively familiar name. These libraries offer something found nowhere else in the contemporary city: heavily used, not-for-profit communal spaces that facilitate many and various kinds of informal social interactions and private uses. Ranging in size from five thousand square feet, a smallish McMansion in Westchester, to thirty thousand square feet, the size of Derek Jeter’s home near Tampa, some of these community libraries are neighborhood branches of an urban library system,  and others stand alone. These buildings look nothing like one another, yet they all offer exemplary moments of architectural innovation. Collectively, they make the case that excellent design is no luxury, certainly not for the civic buildings and lives of people and their communities.

Community libraries have been around for centuries. Andrew Carnegie did not invent them, but recognized in them the means to socialize the cost of knowledge, building nearly 1,700 public libraries across the United States in twenty-eight years. Across the country, local philanthropists built countless others, recognizing that the community library was often the only place to which people had sustained and repeated access simply by virtue of their residence. Even today, to become officially recognized as a borrower at your local library, no more than a recent electric bill is needed—no passport, no green card, no social security number, no purchase necessary. To use the library to sit and read and rest, you need only to want to sit and read and rest.

Books of Ice

Books of Ice, by Basia Irland from Orion Magazine on Vimeo.

Mechanical Bureau

I want this to be my writing desk. Please, someone, get me one. Thanks, in advance...

The Glowing Books of Airan Kang

Illuminating!

The Death of the American Pun

Salon laments.

From the piece...

I should make it clear that I have never seen an episode of the reality show. I hate Bridezillas for one simple reason: Bride does not rhyme with god. Ergo, Bridezillas is not a functioning pun.

The point is significant because bridezilla appears to be symptomatic of a wider malaise: the death of the American pun, replaced by something grosser, dumber, uglier. Examples abound: Take one of the most read websites in the world, Wikipedia, a “pun” on encyclopedia that shares nothing but its suffix. Or techpreneur, the loathsome fusion of technology and entrepreneur. Likewise mansplain, a coinage popular with Internet feminists that adroitly glosses a man addressing a woman in a condescending fashion (e.g., “Akam mansplains that mansplain is not a functioning pun.”) but is still not a functioning pun. Manscaping, the removal of all or part of male body hair, is better—there is at least assonance between the vowel sounds in man and land—but as a pun it remains perilously borderline.

So if recessionista and fembot are not really puns, what are they? They’re neolexic portmanteaus, in which root words are brutally slammed together with cavalier lack of wit.

10 Musicians Who Are Photographers, Too

The list, including Michael Stipe and Bryan Adams, here.

Joss Wheedon's "Much Ado about Nothing"

400,000 Brick Lego Hogwarts

Photos of Famous Authors Performing with Their Bands

Rock on.

The Underground Library

The Underground Library from Keri Tan on Vimeo.

The Collector

The Collector from Green Renaissance on Vimeo.

Zora Neale Hurston Sings

Handkerchief Maps

A map...on a handkerchief.

From a piece on Booktryst...

Handkerchief maps date back to the late 18th century. Examples featuring the plan for Washington D.C. werre sold as "'an authentic plan of the Metropolis of the United States,' advertised as an accurate guide for the prospective purchaser of lots but also as 'a very handsome ornament for the parlor or counting room" (Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, p. 14). These handkerchief maps are believed to have been printed in Boston in 1792 in connection with "the sale of lots in the new 'Federal Town'" (Works Progress Administration, Washington: City and Capital, p. xiv).