In a bittersweet twist of fate, Stephen Colbert’s children’s book, I Am A Pole (and So Can You!) released yesterday, the same day Maurice Sendak died. Sendak, of course, is the author of the classic Where the Wild Things Are, the book that earned him…
Salon has posted Laura Miller’s review of a new interactive edition of Frankenstein, and it sounds like the app is well worth checking out. Released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, it includes supplementary materials like period art and anatomical drawings and is written (or…
TODAY ONLY: Buy The Lesson of the Master or The Coxon Fund for just $5 each. Henry James died on this day in 1916, at the age of 72. He left behind him some of the most cherished novels and characters in the language, and a…
In their newly-released March issue, Scholastic‘s Parents magazine announces a list of the top one hundred books for kids. Culled from over 500 titles suggested by literacy experts, educators, and parents, the list is part of their literacy and reading issue. Scholastic hopes there are some surprises…
Anne Frank is alive and well. That’s the premise in Shalom Auslander‘s new novel Hope: A Tragedy, where Frank is old, uncouth, and typing away in the attic of a farmhouse. Frank is “alive” in a more figurative fashion in Nathan Englander‘s short-story collection What We Talk About When…
I’m 82. I’m ill. My reaction has been to settle here, in Berlin. Act? I can only do that by writing. And yet when I do, it doesn’t have any effect, or it earns me condemnation. With one notable exception. The release in Hungary last…
Among the many abstractions abandoned by modernity and rarely confronted in cosmopolitan, “First World” settings like the one I’m self-congratulatingly writing from, if you will allow that unfashionable designation (especially since, lately, the always permeable boundaries between the first and last worlds are, in many…
We’re familiar with the argument: the modern age is bankrupting our attention spans, we are all technology-addled morons clicking semi-consciously between browser screens, unable to complete the simplest of tasks: mesmerised, drooling, catatonic simpletons. They’re not Claire Tomalin‘s precise words, but let’s imagine that that’s…
Despite the fact that some people believe Charles Dickens can not be read or appreciated by today’s gadget-addled callow youth (see Ellie Robin‘s Mobylives article), the rest of us are celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth — born on this day, February 7th, in…
On this date, January 27, the eminent mathematician and Fellow of Christ Church college, Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832. He is the distinguished author of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations (1867); two…
