Not only do the teetering and battered stacks and shelves of books lining my apartment keep me amused for days on end, they scare most people away (i.e., enable me to give free rein to my burgeoning agoraphobia). If you’re looking for a shortcut, this haunted bookshelf will surely seal the deal. (Via Bookninja.)
Sarah Boxer continues her snide assault (see a reference to part one here) on bloggers and Internet discourse generally, arguing that the Web’s offerings are nothing more than “lists of lists.” But About Last Night, The Elegant Variation, Return of the Reluctant, Sarah Weinman, and many other blogs I read — just go to the article; there’s no point in . . .
Yesterday the Colorado Supreme Court threw out a death sentence in a rape-and-murder case after discovering that jurors copied verses from the Bible while deciding how to sentence the defendant. Agreeing with the defense attorney’s argument that the jurors went beyond the law in administering the sentence, the court observed: At least one juror in this case could have been . . .
The weekend’s Times ran an excerpt from “Cancel Them: The Problem With Literary Readings,” which appears in the latest issue of n+1. Some salient bits: If you’ve made the mistake of going to literary readings, you know that the only thing that can make them endurable is to ha at each funny bit, and ah at each clever observation, and . . .
The Atlantic, suddenly flush with cash, has joined the host of general-interest literary magazines (the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan, to name a few, used to publish O. Henry award winners with some frequency) that have stopped publishing short fiction in recent years. Sort of. For now, “the magazine plans to offer a newsstand only fiction . . .