Sven Birkerts and I don’t agree on much, if anything, about ebooks or the Internet (or cats), but hearing him read his wonderful personal essays — out now from Graywolf — was a highlight of my Pitt trip. See him at McNally Jackson 11/21.
“What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free?” Late ’90s Wired article on Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who died this week at 64.
Muriel Spark wrote a biography of Mary Shelley, Child of Light, that’s been out of print for years. Won’t someone revive it, as an ebook at least? This fan of both novelists would like to read it.
Blake Bailey admires aspects of Tracy Daugherty’s Joseph Heller biography but “can’t help thinking wistfully of what might have been” without the pressure to finish by Catch-22’s 50th anniversary.