This coming Sunday San Francisco marks The Golden Gate Bridge’s 75th birthday with a series of tributes, festivals, and readings. The suspension bridge is known across the globe for its grand towers and sweeping beauty, but also for its place in popular culture, including literature. It would…
This is the tenth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all…
One of the greatest ongoing publications in publishing history is coming to an end: The publishers of the fabled Encyclopaedia Brittannica announced late yesterday that, after 244 years, they are ceasing publicationof their print editions. As Julie Bosman reports in a story for the New…
For those of us interested in the evolution of the written word (and who also enjoy rifling through celebrities’ personal effects), Retronaut has posted a series of letterheads from famous people & companies ranging from 1900-1997. You can see a few selections here. The question…
Writing in the Financial Times, John Lanchester—the author of the novel Capital—asks why it is that so few novelists and poets tackle banking and finance: You can assemble an entire canon of the greatest English language poets from men who had lengthy professional careers in…
At the wonderful Public Domain Review, Julian Barnes tells the story of when Guy de Maupassant met Algernon Swinburne, over lunch at the Normandy home of a man Swinburne was visiting named Powell. Actually, there were three lunches. Here’s how the second one went: Maupassant accepted…
Jack Shafer has high praise for a new book about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate reporting and their most famous source, W. Mark Felt. The book is Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat by Max Holland, to be published March 6 by University Press of…
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…
The 86-year-old daughter of Ezra Pound has launched a legal action to force an Italian fascist group that has named itself after her father to change its name. According to a Guardian report, Mary De Rachewiltz, who still lives in the remote Italian Castle where her…
As Owen Jarus details in a report for MSNBC’s LiveScience, the poem was discovered in the West Virginia University library by visiting professor Elaine Treharne of Florida State University. Translating it from the Latin, she discovered it was written by Lady Elizabeth Dacre, a Catholic,…
