Reviews and News:
When Dolly Parton visits the Library of Congress (to celebrate the 100 million books her nonprofit Imagination Library has given away to children) the same week that antiquarian and poet Ernest Hilbert writes about the history of the Library of Congress in The Washington Post, I take it as a sign that God wants me to remind you, dear reader, that libraries are amazing. (And not that yesterday happened to be World Book Day.) So, check out these five libraries that continue to lend books despite the odds and this piece about why some libraries are eliminating late fees. Also, why not read about how libraries help build healthy communities.
Earlier this year, Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm. The decision killed the publisher LittleThings, which saw a 75% drop in traffic. Who’s next?
Is the podcast the future of words? Richard Brookhiser considers.
The family Byron: “The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no escaping the blaze and shadow of Byron’s brilliance, the persona that he created and the fame that followed his life and death, their own lives were themselves rich in intellectual adventure. In very different ways, they were brave, bold, often hopelessly naive and sometimes maddening. It is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and human.”
John Simon reviews a revisionist account of Oscar Wilde’s post-prison life: “Frankel, who previously edited the uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, has done a thorough job of digging through the plethora of material about Wilde that has been committed to paper. His purpose is to refute the traditional view of Wilde ending as a broken martyr, a victim of hypocritical Victorian morality. As explained on the book’s dust jacket, Frankel aims to give us a Wilde who pursues his ‘post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.’”
Essay of the Day:
Sit back and enjoy this one: Andrew Stuttaford writes about alien tourism in America in The New Criterion:
“After losing my way last summer in a tiny town best known as the deathplace of Billy the Kid, I eventually located the right desert highway. Outperforming the alleged aliens who, seventy years before, had allegedly crashed their alleged spacecraft nearby, I swept past a welcome sign decorated with—in honor of a cow town’s real and imagined pasts—cattle and a flying saucer, and reached Roswell, New Mexico, in one piece: ‘The City of Roswell invites UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike to join in the celebration of one of the most debated incidents in history.’
“History is not what it was.”
Photo: Five Fingers Hill
Poem: Dara Weir, “in the still of the night”
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