This post was written by Friday guest blogger Emma Garman. Jim Rosenau, a Californian carpenter and artist, uses second-hand books to make bookshelves and bookcases that are artistic, functional and environmentally sound: Rosenau’s grandfather and his father were both book publishers. But his main inspiration, he says was one essay, “Books as Furniture,” by Nicholson Baker, which describes how people . . .
Nashville’s own Clay Risen offers a thoughtful critique of “Down There on a Visit,” a kind of travel essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic that appeared in the August 12 issue of the New York Review of Books. Simic braved the wilds of Georgia and Alabama for a few weeks in a car this summer and on the basis . . .
Deborah Schoeneman reports that Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist) at a Poets & Writers party, having nursed a grudge for two years over Whitehead’s negative New York Times review of A Multitude of Sins: In any event, at a March 2 party in New York for Poets & Writers magazine, Whitehead says, Ford approached him and said, . . .