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Eliot Weinberger, literary renegade

On an overcast evening last November, I met the American essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger at a gentrified West Village coffee shop. Having got there early, I was…

Beyond Shakespeare at The Critical Flame

Thanks to Daniel Pritchard and the Critical Flame for publishing my short opinion piece on Shakespeare and globalism. I wrote the piece in conjunction with my participation in…

The pot in the garden

Shakespeare’s garden, that is (click image for link to BBC video).    

Coming soon to an HR department near you?

IBM has developed a program called the “The IBM Watson Personality Insights Service” that “uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the…

What is water?

Cool video made from David Foster Wallace commencement address.

Tom Kristensen

Maybonne returned recently from a trip to Europe, which included a swing through northern Germany and Denmark. While there she took a few pictures of Christensen-related books and…

Happy birthday, Jorge Luis Borges

Feliz cien duodécimo, estimado señor autor!

The Naipaul Test

V. S. Naipaul continues to provoke and offend. In a talk at the Royal Geographic Society he said: I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or…

Randomized Editing

I have a month to polish up the book I’m currently working on, and I’m experimenting with a randomized editing process. Most writers spend a lot of time…

New new Shakespeare portraits

More fun with computer morphing. What did Shakespeare look like? It’s possible one of these computer morphs might provide a clue. The image on the left morphs the…

A new portrait of William Shakespeare

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…

World book news: 13 rules for writers

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…

J. D. Salinger

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

On the loss of vitality in writing

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…

Mailbag: Bellemeade Books and Jonathan Williams

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…

I touch your mouth . . .

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…

The Constipation Party

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…

What do these books have in common?

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…

The dangerous world of butterflies

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

Major new Cortazar book appearing this week

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…

Poets ranked by the gravity of their beards

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…

Jim Houston, 1933-2009

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….

Shakespeare, again

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…

Shakespeare’s likeness

Is this really a contemporary’s portrait of Shakespeare? .