Notorious art forger claims ‘‘La Bella Principessa’’ as his own
Controversy has been compounded with more controversy in the story of a drawing thought by some to be a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci. La Bella Principessa features an aristocratic… Read more »
French Booksellers Association releases reading list meant to shed light on Paris attacks
Following the attacks in Paris on November 13, the French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française, or SLF) has released a reading list designed to help people better understand the complex… Read more »
Uproar over publication of Haruki Murakami’s high school library records
As a library patron, the right to privacy is a hugely important one, and when violations of that privacy become public, librarians tend to get pretty angry. And they’ve had cause… 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 »
First Shelley, now Brontë: Yet another 19th century writer to publish new work
It’s been a fruitful month for academic sleuths—Oxford acquired a long lost political poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, an upcoming catalog of Francis Bacon features over one-hundred never-before-seen paintings, including one discovered… Read more »
Call Me Ishmael says, “No really — call me!”
Back in 2014, two friends in Georgia set up a phone number and created Call Me Ishmael, a project that allowed people to call and leave a message describing a… 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 »
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 »
Building the better bookshelf
Does the number of books in your home worry you? Do you lose track of the books you’re most interested in? Well, sir/madame, Behold the single book bookshelf: Finally, you can present a… Read more »
Charles Dickens just gave us the “Rosetta Stone of Victorian literature”
Many of us in the book trade are experiencing burnout this week on the topic of previously “lost” works by iconic authors. Which is unfortunate, because Lazarus books are one… Read more »