-- Breakfast at Tiffany's, the weird and wonderful Truman Capote novella that was (heavily) adapted into the famed Audrey Hepburn film, is opening as a Broadway play. On WBUR's "On Point," Tom Ashbrook revisits the classic with the director and two culture writers, questioning what has given the story "such staying power, such magnetism."
-- "Capote's Co-conspirators." Via The New Yorker.
-- The letters of Willa Cather were once banned. Next month, all will be revealed.
-- Stephen King and his wife Tabitha pledge $3 million to their local library in Bangor, Maine.
-- "In the Kingdom of the First Person." Looking back and forth between James Baldwin and the New York Review of Books.
-- Toni Morrison at West Point.
-- Amazing news: Independent bookstores are doing better than they've done in years.
-- "Do-It-Yourself Language." On the inventions of languages -- including the language of mathematics.
-- "How pi was nearly changed to 3.2 -- and copyrighted!"
-- Please, no more "Found in Translation" headlines! That said, here's an account from a woman learning Vietnamese-to-English translation. Mentions Ezra Pound as a translator of Chinese literature.
-- The Authors & Translators blog specializes in the relationship between ... well, you know.
-- "Looting: Mary Jo Bang’s Dante and Anne Carson’s Sophocles show that translation can be more creative than dull obedience to an original text." Via The Boston Review.
-- "The thing is, I do feel like growing up in Detroit sort of naturally forces most of us to deal with trauma. ... I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Detroiters are not spoiled. We are used to disappointment in a weird way, so we don’t go through life thinking everything has to go our way. We’re OK with change. With deterioration. And I mean, in that transcendental way. We know things die. We love them while they last. I think that kind of familiarity with decay is somewhat particular to Detroit. It allows for a kind of duende in the art, I think." Poet francine j. harris, people.
-- Arcadia: author Lauren Groff speaks with Guernica about "the art of optimism, gender bias in the literary world, and donning public personas."
-- "Around the liberal arts there is this horrible self-regard and complacency that art is always good and therapeutic." It's about time: The Tim Parks Interview.
-- The Dart Society for Trauma Journalism has a new name.
-- Good work from The Investigative Fund: "Inside Baseball's Dominican Sweatshop System."
-- The making of the Black Panther Party.
-- I love Margaret Sullivan and her odd public editor role at the New York Times. The Nation does too. Elsewhere: "It is possible that I’ll be The Washington Post’s last independent ombudsman..."
-- How the "women's page" became the "style section."
-- I always look forward to Evgeny Morozov's smart, incisive tech criticism and "work of creative destruction" -- so decidedly unflustered by fads and assumptions.
-- Hello, writers: here's a great residency opportunity at the Thurber House.
-- Katherine Boo, artist of narrative nonfiction that she is, thinks you should read these three books.
-- Ben Okri, Rotimi Babutunde and "Literary Ibadan." Elsewhere, the writer (who decided to move to Nigeria) picks out her five favorite works of Nigerian literature.
-- Taiye Selase, author of "the eagerly anticipated novel, Ghana Must Go," write in The Guardian: "The Afropolitan."
-- "We're thrilled to hear that Marianne Boruch has been awarded the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013, while Heidy Stiedlmayer has won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award."
-- "Working Girl." On the life and work of Edna St. Vincent Millay. "... she wrote and she wrote and she wrote."
-- I am so excited to have in my hands an early copy of Muriel Rukeyser's previously unpublished novel, Savage Coast, released this year for Rukeyser's centennial by The Feminist Press.
-- Looking back at Angela Carter, and her harnessing of the power of fairy tales.
-- "The Missing Half of Les Mis" ... that is, revolution.
-- "Neil deGrasse Tyson is stepping up his game, roaring, cajoling, stomping his big, considerable, eloquent self to say we have got to, got to, GOT TO, step off this planet and go places, back to the moon, on to Mars, that we can't afford not to, that if we don't, if we don't support a manned space program, we are robbing ourselves, we are stepping on 'the foundations of tomorrow's economies,' without which, 'we might as well slide back to the cave, because that's where we're headed now, broke!'" With video.
-- This, then, is the final act of Nora Ephron.
-- Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.
-- How designers over the years have interpreted the cover of Andre Breton's very strange book, Nadja.
-- At The New York Times: "Favorite Book Cover Designs of 2012."
-- "Poshlost Highway." Celebrating the writings of Dubravka Ugresic, alongside Nabokov, Mandelstam, Plato, Michael Jackson, Isaac Babel, and Buster Keaton.
-- Libraries win in a Supreme Court case about books published overseas.
-- The Paris Review celebrates sixty years of literary livelihood, in part with a special issue featuring an "Art of Fiction" interview with Deborah Eisenberg that I am salivating over already.
-- Kevin Smokler on "why you should revisit the classics from high school."
-- A fabulous literary center called City of Asylum is opening in Pittsburgh next year.
-- How novelists bring to life the past, for better and worse.
-- It became hot news after it was horribly taken out of context. But regardless of that nonsense, you should read Booker-winner Hilary Mantel's marvelous and haunting speech, Royal Bodies, in full in the London Review of Books. Reading Mantel makes me want to be a better writer. Her mind and her honesty both shimmer.
-- Have you filled out my sweet and short Isak Reader Survey? I want to hear from you! Plus, you have the chance to win free books.
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