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“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should [...]

The following is a message sent by Exquisite Corpse to its subscribers.
Dear readers:
Did you miss us? We missed you. It’s only been a brief eon but the idiots have taken over the world, and the internet is seducing us all into trading in our brains for beads. Welcome back to the Post-Katrina Resurrection Corpse, [...]

Conde Nast commissioned a distinguished group of writers to nominate their favorite travel books. Participating authors included André Aciman, Monica Ali, Julia Alvarez, Tom Bissell, Geraldine Brooks, Vikram Chandra, Jim Crace, Jared Diamond, Linh Dinh, Anthony Doerr, Jennifer Egan, Stephen Elliott, Nuruddin Farah, Nell Freudenberger, Peter Godwin, Peter Hessler, Uzodinma Iweala, Sebastian Junger, Robert D. [...]

Candida Höfer’s photographs of Portuguese libraries, now on display at the Sonnabend Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street in NYC, presents libraries as places of opulence. In these settings the books, clearly precious objects, convey an almost religious authority.
Shown is Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra VI 2006.
Via If:Book.

Fernando del Paso will receive the $100,000 FIL Literature Prize for lifetime literary achievement iat the 2007 Guadalajara International Book Fair on November 24.
An excerpt from del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico, translated by Elizabeth Plaister, is included in New World / New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas, A Bilingual Anthology, now at the printer.
Palinuro [...]

The Guardian asked 50 writers to nominate neglected books that deserve a second chance with the public. “The majority of books fall stillborn from the press, never living up to their authors’ hopes for recognition or dreams of a large, admiring audience,” Robert McCrum, who introduces the list, writes. “So those bestseller lists [...]

The entire series of Ross Macdonald Lew Archer novels is returning to print from Vintage Books. The early Archer novels are derivative of Chandler — some would say the entire series is — but as Macdonald’s career progressed he became more interested in the buried roots of violence than its turbulent theatricality. Archer would often [...]

A story often repeated is that Joyce’s sometime amanuensis, Samuel Beckett, inserted the words “come in” into Finnegans Wake, unaware that Joyce was answering a knock at the door. This story originates, I think, with Richard Ellman’s biography, James Joyce; at any rate it appears there. I think that Beckett himself may have promoted the [...]

If you like your literature bite-sized, Daily Lit could be the answer. It will send you a five-minute passage of a selection of public domain books by e-mail or rss every day (or on request). War and Peace, for example, comes in 675 parts, so you could finished it up in a couple of years, [...]

I was lucky to get it, I think.
Plus, I am awesome.
How about you?
You know the Bible 85%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!
Ultimate Bible [...]

Here’s a cool web feature for lit types. Clicking the map (the image above is a detail) takes you to a section of an 1859 map of London. Once at the map detail you can get further information about that part of town. For example, you can click a “dictionary” button, which takes you to [...]

Another entry for “blogs we love.” I just discovered BlbliOdyssey (”Books, Illustrations, Science, History, Visual Materia Obscura, and Eclectic Bookart”) recently, but it only takes a few minutes to get hooked at this site, which collects pages from illustrated manuscripts and books. (It’s marred only by the unfortunate placement of Google adsense ads directly under [...]

The great (?) thing about press checks — as mentioned in previous posts I am currently stationed in Bruges on press for a book about Indian art from the kingdom of Mewar — is that it has intervals of idleness between forms. So I have used these to finally post my introduction to Celine’s Ballets [...]

That’s the name for a new NEA initiative “designed to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.” As I understand, the idea is to promote literacy by turning whole communities into enormous reading groups. If you live in one of [...]

Will Self’s writing room. A 360 degree view in 71 photos by Phil Grey

For an anthology I’ve been working on the publisher chose to copyedit some classic texts. It made me wonder how they would handle Shakespeare.

I’ve finally posted my introduction to the Mercury House edition of Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom. I might have done this sooner but the original file had been lost. Rereading this thirteen years (!) later, I think it’s a pretty solid piece of work. Let me know what you think (or if you [...]

I’ve posted, in beta, my new essay on Asian influences on European printing. This essay is intended for print, but I’d like to get some feedback from knowledgable folks first (or even afterwards, for that matter). So this is the space for that. This was a pretty big project, so I hope someone might want [...]