For a bit of fun, a tongue-in-cheek romantic book spine poem, inspired by everyone's favorite Austen hero: Sailing alone around the roomDancing with Mr. Darcy,Lips together, teeth apart:Great expectations. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins Dancing with Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and…
Read More "Book Spine Poetry, Vol. 2: “Dancing with Mr. Darcy”"
Image via Pasadena Museum of History "My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 am. So as not to be dead." (from The Illustrated Man) Credited…
Last week The New Yorker began nightly tweeting portions of a new Jennifer Egan story, titled "Black Box." Over the course of ten installments, Egan's futuristic spy thriller was formed, with each 140-character tweet serving as its heroine's undercover dispatches. Read all together the tweets have a certain poetic quality; you can't help but notice…
Read More "Jennifer Egan Tweets Serial Fiction with “Black Box”"
Another summer, another parade of blockbusters attempting to keep movie studios in the black. But beside the action adventure films based on board games and comic book heroes, some of the most anticipated films of 2012 are its classic literary adaptations. Here's a wrap up of five you can expect to see in cinemas over…
Read More "eNotes Picks 5 Anticipated Film Adaptations of 2012"
Last week's post spoke a bit about the digital revolution taking place in book publishing. Continuing on that theme, here's an interesting discovery that--in a roundabout fashion--would actually serve to preserve the legacy of printed books: Imagine being able to hold an out-of-print, highly coveted work in your hands--say, Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice…
Inspired by Brain Pickings' book spine poetry--a recent tribute to National Poetry Month--I decided to draw from my own bookshelf and try my hand at the form: The trouble with poetry:The innocent wit,The edge of reason,The fact of a doorframe. The Trouble with Poetry: and other poems by Billy Collins The…
Read More "Book Spine Poetry, Vol. 1: “The Trouble with Poetry”"
As a bit of a purist on the book front, it's been a rocky road to accept anything not printed on paper and bound by a soft cover. When e-readers first became popular, I was there, standing on the proverbial soapbox, lamenting to disinterested friends the decline of bookshelves, the end of book publishing. I…
Read More "The Next Generation Digital Book: A Whole New Way to Read"
The year before he died, acclaimed philosopher Bertrand Russell published the final volume in his series of autobiographies. Spanning twenty-five years of his life, from 1944 to 1969, this final chapter might be Lord Russell's most intimate. Brutally honest, and often humorous, he writes about everything from his religious self-questioning to his second imprisonment for…
