Books
Oct. 17, 2010
What are books good for?
So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others.… [T]he two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is [...]
Tags: ebooks
Sep. 18, 2010
What makes Emma Bovary so interesting?
Sometimes in reading at random, weird patterns emerge. The last couple of days I ran across these two quotes, both trashing sacred-cow novelists. In the first, from The Paris Review in 1963, Katherine Anne Porter explains why she detests F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not only didn’t I like [Fitzgerald's] writing, but I didn’t like the people he [...]
Tags: characters
Sep. 1, 2010
The High-Low Problem
The problem [Pauline] Kael undertook to address when she began writing for The New Yorker was the problem of making popular entertainment respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the high-low problem — the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow [...]
Tags: art criticism · John le Carre · Louis Menand
Aug. 22, 2010
Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book
Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are [...]
Tags: ebooks · technology
Aug. 20, 2010
Fitzgerald Repackaged
Penguin Classics will publish new editions of six major works by F. Scott Fitzgerald in stunning new designs. Gorgeous. More here. (Via.)
Tags: book design · F. Scott Fitzgerald
Aug. 4, 2010
DeLillo: “The writer leads”
Don DeLillo’s 1997 letter to Jonathan Franzen: *The writer leads.*
Tags: Don DeLillo · quotes for writers
Jul. 26, 2010
Gorgeous Borges
From the latest round of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, a sumptuous cover for a collection of essays by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s enough to make a writer green with envy. Design by We Made This, a graphic design studio in London (with a lovely blog, too). More about the Borges cover is here. Still, my [...]
Tags: book design
Jul. 13, 2010
How James Bond Got His Name
Ian Fleming explains.
Tags: Ian Fleming · James Bond · video
