Say it ain’t so: Amazon comes to Brooklyn
Thrilling news, Brooklynites: Amazon is planning to open its first distribution center in the borough. The Real Deal’s Ariel Stulberg reported late last week that the online retail behemoth signed a seven-year… Read more »
Brewery starts literary mag for those who “like to think and drink”
The founder of Delaware-based brewing company Dogfish Head, Sam Calagione, has a habit of describing his product as “analog beer for the digital age.” Now, according to the company’s website, the former English major… Read more »
New “indie dramedy” loosely inspired by David Foster Wallace, but what isn’t?
Another set of Hollywood execs trying devilishly to monetize David Foster Wallace’s literary legacy? That’s the inevitable reaction to Entertainment Weekly’s announcement that SNL veteran Bill Hader is set to star in a forthcoming film “adaptation”… Read more »
NYRB archive, including complaining letters from Henry Kissinger and some surprising rejections, sold to NYPL
Yesterday the New York Public Library’s Board of Trustees announced that the library had acquired approximately 3,000 linear feet of editorial materials from the New York Review of Books archive. The papers date… Read more »
Re-discovered dead letter archive offers rare insight into 17th-century life
There’s mystery and romance in the idea of an unread letter, used as a plot device by such writers as Shakespeare, Colum McCann, and Martin Amis. The recent rediscovery of… Read more »
Long lost—and angry! —Shelley poem found after 200 years
Not long after news broke that the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford had acquired a lost poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the library’s website crashed. It has been long acknowledged that as an… Read more »
French vending machines dispense fiction instead of snacks
As our lives become busier and our screen-time perpetual, some have predicted that the short story would become the most readily-consumed literary form of the age. Now the city of… Read more »
Okay, okay: Orwell was no Byron
Last month, despite apparent reservations, The Orwell Society decided to publish a slim volume of 42 little-known poems written by George Orwell. The poems were written over a 35-year span, from… Read more »
Two new Robert Walser translations coupled with art
The work of the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) languished in relative obscurity for decades, but a slew of recent English translations of his work have raised his profile… Read more »
Slavoj Žižek calls Tavis Smiley “The Big One”
If you’re interested in hearing the brilliant, sometimes-contentious Slovenian philosopher and Melville House author Slavoj Žižek discuss political correctness, the 2008 financial crisis, and what he sees as one of Malcolm X’s… Read more »