November 2010
37 posts
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
—
C.S. Lewis
(Happy Birthday!)
I Heart Ann Beattie →
thedailybeast.com
Here’s more, too, from the Paris Review.
Go get The New Yorker Stories, perhaps now.
Yes, please.
“You become a writer because you need to become a writer—nothing else.”
—Grace Paley
Happy Birthday George Eliot
Born Mary Anne Evans on this day in 1819.
“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.” - Middlemarch
From the Mixed-Up Files of David Foster Wallace →
newsweek.com
“Hi I am a kettle. Ouch! Listen I come to you for advice. This flame is real hot but I love my job.”
—from a story written by nine year-old David Foster Wallace
included in a great trove of material featured in Newsweek
“I’ve always loved books, all my life. When I was a clerk at Scribner’s bookstore I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on the shelf. When I would have to unpack and put up the National Book Award winners I used to wonder what it would feel like to be a National Book Award winner, so thank you for letting me find out. And please, publishers: there is nothing more beautiful than the book. The paper, the font, the cloth. Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
—
Patti Smith, accepting the National Book Award (via austinkleon)
Congratulations to Patti Smith. We’re very proud to have the Scribner name tangentially associated with someone so great.
Man Reports Own Amazon.com Order As "Suspicious Package" →
consumerist.com
A smiling box would make us suspicious, too.
Oh, and this also happened today... →
deadline.com
Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. What do you think?
Knowing what you don't know
From the transcript of the interview between Don Imus and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of “The Emperor of All Maladies”
IMUS: The book is a genius book. It is called “The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer.” In other words, he writes about cancer as though it is a person, the history of cancer.
MCCORD: That is interesting.
IMUS: And, his name — I can’t pronounce his name.
MCCORD: Let me guess.
IMUS: Dr. Sid, we’re going to call him.
MCCORD: Yes.
IMUS: But, brilliant guy, Siddhartha —
MCCORD: Mukherjee, it looks like that something.
IMUS: Something like that. Bernie, we can’t book people whose names I can’t pronounce.
(LAUGHTER)
BERNARD MCGUIRK, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Well that would be about 80 percent of our guests.
(LAUGHTER)
In honor of Tumblr Tuesday, here are some of the folks we’ve been enjoying:
· The Atlantic: http://theatlantic.tumblr.com/
· McNally Jackson: http://mcnallyjackson.tumblr.com/
· Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: http://hmhbooks.tumblr.com/
· Fwriction: http://fwriction.tumblr.com/
· Gatsbylives: http://gatsbylives.tumblr.com/
· i12bent: http://i12bent.tumblr.com/
If you like what we do here, please recommend us under ‘Books.’ Grazie.
“Around September, everyone started saying that Freedom by Jonathan Franzen was the book of the year, which was a relief as I’d been fairly slack in keeping up; now I could just cut to the chase and read that. Much as it would be nice to counteract the hype, it had me absolutely hooked. I know some people have criticised it for being about neurotic middle-class people, but as a neurotic middle-class person, I can honestly say that this isn’t a problem at all.”
—
Mark Watson
author of the forthcoming Eleven in the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year
“
William Faulkner, speaking of Ernest Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Hemingway’s response: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
” —(via chocolateinthelibrary)