If most Americans can’t come to Hemingway’s home in Cuba, then some of his belongings are coming to them: the JFK Library in Boston will acquire 2,000 digital copies of Hemingway’s papers, including letters, grocery lists, reports of hurricane sightings, and bar bills. “How did we get here, angels?” Michael Kammen at the Los Angeles Read More
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Shelf notes: ‘Gatsby’ fever and literary dachshunds
Copies of “The Great Gatsby” are selling at an “extraordinary” rate, thanks to the publicity surrounding the Leonardo DiCaprio film of the novel, set to open on May 10. One caveat: do not read the movie’s tie-in edition on the subway. The new book “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War Read More
‘Add New Post’
I’ve approached the blank page, wincing a little as I type. It’s been months and months since I’ve last posted anything – mea culpa – and, in the intervening time, there have been so many worthy books (though, as usual, not always the ones I expected and not nearly, nearly as many as I’d like). Read More
Book News
For the third year in a row, Edgar Allan Poe’s biggest fan has failed to materialize at his grave in Baltimore: “When he appears, the Toaster is typically shrouded in a long coat, his head covered with some kind of hat and a scarf that drapes across his face, the spotters say. He strides quickly Read More
Without Borders
When the Borders Books on High Ridge Road announced its doors were closing a few months ago, I witnessed a mad rush of customers eager to scoop up the last of the ailing store’s goods. Interminably long lines snaked through the store, through the rifled, half-empty shelves stamped with bright orange 70% off stickers. People Read More
Once upon a midnight dreary
Image via Wikipedia Edgar Allan Poe – spinner of spine-tinglers and tales of hearts that won’t stay still – immediately springs to mind when Halloween approaches. Few other horror stories in literature have quite the bone-chilling, heart-stopping quality of Poe’s, peopled with devious killers and strange, haunting manifestations of guilt. I’ve never quite been able to Read More
Book spotting
I was wandering through the Ferguson Library the other day, with no determined purpose, when I spotted one of the usual book displays on the first floor and noticed that the arrangement of the books seemed a little…familiar. “This Side of Paradise” next to “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”? “A Connecticut Yankee in Read More
‘Dramatizing the act of reading’
When I first read “The Great Gatsby”, it was summer — the best time of year, I think, to become acquainted with Gatsby’s decadent stretch of Long Island. Lying on the beach, I flipped through sun-soaked pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s languid prose, wishing I could dust off my sandy feet and step straight into Read More
