Dave McKean’s Celluloid and Jim Woodring’s Congress of the Animals are finalists for the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novels — more details on our blog.
How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries
An interview with the creator
The concept, sponsored by Locke’s imaginary Department of Urban Betterment, is that New Yorkers will pick up unfamiliar titles while running their errands and then, perhaps, replace them the next day with favorite books of their own. That’s in an ideal world. Of the twoguerrilla libraries that the artist has fashioned, one has been used properly while the other has had its entire collection repeatedly ganked by sticky-fingered pedestrians. Its shelves were also stolen.
But Locke has many more libraries planned. With plywood consoles that slip over payphones as neatly as aprons, these sidewalk objets are endlessly replicable. (No doubt they’ll feature in his 2012 Columbia course, “Hacking the Urban Experience.”) I caught up with Locke over the weekend to ask him about what was and wasn’t working with these literary outposts, as well as why he started the project in the first place.
More at The Atlantic
This is an incredible idea. I’m going to try and find one pronto.
Heaven…
“Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn’t have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn’t be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library’s peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light…” (234-235)
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
LOVE love love Google’s Dickens doodle for his 200th bday!
Jews held captive in Mauritius in WWII??! How the hell did I not know this??? Thanks to my current reading: THE LAST BROTHER! I might not have known otherwise.
Reading Vanity Fair. And I admit, this is one of those rare cases when the movie cover is enchanting! Love that red dress.
“…she told them India, and even that they didn’t always understand (Lakota? asked the gas station attendant, and Marina would have to work very hard not to roll her eyes because her mother had explained that eye-rolling was the height of rudeness and was never an appropriate response, even to very stupid questions).” (35)
Embarking upon a second buddy read with Heather from http://www.capriciousreader.com! We had such fun with Madame Bovary, we just couldn’t wait.
From A.S. Byatt’s commentary on Madame Bovary:
The great realist novels study at length what happens after marriage, within marriages, within families and businesses. One of the great subjects of the realist novel is boredom - narrow experiences in small places and unsympathetic groups. There is no greater study of boredom than Madame Bovary - which is nevertheless never boring, but always both terrifying and simultaneously gleeful over its own accuracy.
