Few things have the power to draw me out of the hermitage on winter weekends, but when Lizzie invited me down to Baltimore for The Wire‘s Season Five Premiere, I packed my bags and hopped on a train. Of course the party was fun (more photos here). But watching the show on the big screen was magic — until the . . .
I’m amazed at how radiant and kind-faced Gran Newt, my great-great grandmother on my dad’s father’s father’s side, looks in this photo, considering she raised her children in a house without a ceiling. Her son told the Drew, Mississippi newspaper it was so frigid on winter mornings that “when papa would walk through the hall to the other side of . . .
The literary allure of sin is universal, says Words Without Borders, where the latest issue is The Seven Deadly Sins.
As the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth draws nigh, English-speaking readers still don’t have access to an accurate translation of The Second Sex. At least Jonathan Cape intends to publish one; it’s in the works. (Little thanks to Knopf, which reportedly accepted the project in 2000 but became “so fed up with feminists saying how terrible the translation was” . . .
On the PEN World Voices 2008 program: The Three Musketeers Reunited, featuring Eco, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, on 5/2. (Via.)