blog.rightreading.com

What did Shakespeare look like? I will come to how I created the above image in a moment. First we need to review the existing portraits that are claimed to be of Shakespeare.
All of the three or four likeliest images of him are problematic in one way or another. The three likeliest portraits are the [...]

Today I initiate what I am hoping will become a more or less weekly feature here at blog.rightreading.com — a report on book news from newspapers and journals around the world. (I say “more or less weekly” because I am currently working on a big project that is taking most of my time, and this [...]

Now that he’s passed away everybody who has ever read a book is writing about him. Enough! I call time out!

When the ancients wrote books they were trying to get at reality and transmit spirit. But all they could convey was a general idea, in order to help lead people to the truth. Much of their spirit, their energy, their words and laughter and actions, could not be captured.
When modern generations write books they ape [...]

Mark Bromberg of Bellemeade Books writes on the subject of Jonathan Williams, author and publisher of the Jargon Society (we published his The Magpie’s Bagpipe at North Point Press) and generously includes the above scan of a Jargon Society publication, which I take the liberty of sharing.
… I have been a long-time reader and admirer [...]

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over [...]

I am reading and enjoying Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It is my misfortune, I realize, to be so sensitized to colonialist attitudes as to imagine I detect in the book a faint taint of colonialist condescension.
But I am not here today to rant about colonialism but rather to share the following [...]

Maurice Bendrix, The Ambitious Host
D. B. Caulfield, The Secret Goldfish
Vivian Darkbloom, My Cue
Nicholas de Selby, Country AlbumGwendolen Erme, Deep Down, Overmastered
Andrew Hibbard, The Chasm of the Mind
Robin Penrose, Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in Victorian Fiction
Boris Alekseyevich Trigorin, Days and Nights
Harriet Vane, Murder By Degrees

Answer after the break . . [...]

Here’s Peter Laufer, three or four of whose books I published at Mercury House, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

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Cortazar’s unpublished works have been collected and will be released at the Feria Internacional del Libro en Buenos Aires within a few days.
This should be a big book. If no one in the U.S. has snatched it up yet, some enterprising publisher should get in touch with Carmen Balcells right away.
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In his 1913 classic (if that’s the right word) publication entitled Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, Upton Uxbridge Underwood (1881–1937) ranked poets according to the gravity of their beards, assigning each one a “pogonometric index” score. (So I have learned from A Journey Round My Skull, which informs me that Underwood was “a deipnosophist, clubman, [...]

James D. Houston died last week after a struggle with cancer. I published his In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey at Mercury House in 1997. He was a pleasure to work with.

Just a week ago a portrait of Shakespeare emerged that was supposedly painted by a contemporary. Now a fellow named John Casson (“an independent researcher and psychotherapist”) who “spent three years studying writings thought to be connected to Shakespeare” (wow! three years!), claims to have discovered six “new” works by Shakespeare.
Considering that there has been [...]

Is this really a contemporary’s portrait of Shakespeare?

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Which author wrote these lines about a lover’s vagina?
[It] did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze . . .

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But we can make an exception for Joe Lieberman.
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via thedailyaphorism.com/
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BTW, There are a few quotations here at rightreading.com as well, including this one from Wilde.
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Mary Reynolds (1891-1950) was an innovative book binder who for three decades enjoyed a relationship with Marcel Duchamp described by friends as “happier than most marriages.” Susan Glover Godlewski has written about her life and career, and examples of her work can be seen at the Mary Reynolds Collection (affiliated with the Art Institute of [...]

Having served on several literary award committees, ranging from local ones like the Northern California Book Awards to national gigs like serving as an NEA panelist, I recognized something of the process revealed in forty years of recollections of Booker Prize judges, as reported in the Guardian recently.
If you are going to participate in this [...]

Jerry Levitan, working with direction Josh Raskin, illustrator James Braithwaite, and digital artist Alex Kurina, has produced an animated version of an interview he made thirty-eight years ago with John Lennon. Levitan was fourteen at the time, and Lennon was generous in answering his questions.
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via crap detector
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Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.” Words that appear more often are presented more prominently. The site will make word clouds from text that you provide or from urls or even from a del.icio.us user’s tags. It’s so pointless it almost becomes interesting.
What if some well-known American writers [...]