The University of Chicago Press is reissuing Levi Stahl’s favorite work of fiction, Anthony Powell’s classic 12-volume roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, as ebooks. Volume 1 is free this month.
If you’re loading Instapaper with holiday reading, be sure to include E.B. White’s gorgeous “The Death of a Pig,” on grief over losing livestock, written before Charlotte’s Web. (Via, via; on White & the environment.)
Katherine Anne Porter — writer, liar, social-climber, and expert divorcee and re-marrier — would have loved the drama surrounding her archives. (Via.) See also.
This cartoon — found in Mark Twain Himself: a Pictorial Biography, thanks to Macy Halford — exposes my beloved Twain as a fellow noise-intolerant freak. Evidently he rose on Thanksgiving night at the cartoonist’s house “to stop the clocks that were interfering with his sleep.” I myself have gotten out of bed to silence clocks in other people’s houses. I . . .