Literary cat makes library visits

"A Kent library has been visited almost every day for two years by its own 'puss in books', the council has said.

Fidel, an eight-year-old black cat, turns up at Deal library almost every day while his owners are at work.

He spends the day on his favourite blue chair, only leaving the building when he sees his owners arriving home."

Nabokov's last work will not be burned

Having kept the literary world in a state of suspense for years over whether he was prepared to carry out his long-standing threat to burn his father's last novel, Dmitri Nabokov has finally announced that he is prepared to save it from destruction.

Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura will now not be thrown onto the flames, the 73-year-old has told Der Spiegel magazine, arguing that his father, the creator of Lolita and Pale Fire who died in 1977, would not want his son to suffer any more over his most tortuous dilemma.

Writers' words in the places they describe

Let's follow Canada and display writers' words in the places they describe

It's an arresting image – the moment when a nun falls from Toronto's Bloor Street Viaduct in Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion, and is caught by a worker. 'He saw it was a black-garbed bird, a girl's white face. He saw this in the light that sprayed down inconsistently from a flare fifteen yards above them. They hung in the halter, pivoting over the valley, his broken arm loose on one side of him, holding the woman with the other … '
And this is an arresting idea from a group of Canadians – a plan to place permanent markers displaying text from stories and poems in the locations where they take place. Yesterday saw Ondaatje launch the project on Bloor Street Viaduct, and there are plans to place what they're calling Bookmarks across Canada – Carol Shields in Winnipeg, Michael Crummey in St John's, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces on Toronto's Grace Street.

Cooking By Numbers

I'd like to add this to my collection.

In his latest book, “Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking” (Scribner), Michael Ruhlman shares Hestnar’s ratio charts. When you look at them side by side, things start to make sense. For example, a simple ratio by weight of flour to water — 5 parts flour and 3 parts water — will make bread dough. A basic cookie dough is 1-2-3: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat and 3 parts flour, always by weight."

JOHN UPDIKE T-SHIRT

In keeping with the legacy of quality narrative Updike so cherished, the proceeds from this t-shirt will go towards ensuring the continued publication of Flatmancrooked’s Anthology of New Writing.

Flatmancrooked
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Brian McGilloway's top 10 modern Irish crime novels

"'Crime fiction has taken off in Ireland over the past few years with a number of our best writers winning awards and making an impact on the international scene. If anything marks out the movement it's the sheer diversity of sub-genres, from PI novels to police procedurals, by way of political satire and screwball comedy. And that's not including John Connolly's Charlie Parker series which is absent here only because it is set in the USA. Many of the recent group of Irish crime writers (myself included) cite Connolly as the inspiration that got them writing. As an introduction to this recent growth and range in the genre, here are 10 of my favourites from the past decade.'"Brian McGilloway's top 10

R.I.P.Deborah Digges 1950-2009

Darwin's Finches
1 My mother always called it a nest,
the multi-colored mass harvested

from her six daughters' brushes,
and handed it to one of us

after she had shaped it, as we sat in front
of the fire drying our hair.

She said some birds steal anything, a strand
of spider's web, or horse's mane,

the residue of sheep's wool in the grasses
near a fold

where every summer of her girlhood
hundreds nested.

Since then I've seen it for myself, their genius -
how they transform the useless.

I've seen plastics stripped and whittled
into a brilliant straw,

and newspapers—the dates, the years—
supporting the underweavings.

2 As tonight in our bed by the window
you brush my hair to help me sleep, and clean

the brush as my mother did, offering
the nest to the updraft.

I'd like to think it will be lifted as far
as the river, and catch in some white sycamore,

or drift, too light to sink, into the shaded inlets,
the bank-moss, where small fish, frogs, and insects

lay their eggs.
Would this constitute an afterlife?

The story goes that sailors, moored for weeks
off islands they called paradise,

stood in the early sunlight
cutting their hair. And the rare

birds there, nameless, almost extinct,
came down around them

and cleaned the decks
and disappeared into the trees above the sea.

Deborah Digges was the author of four collections of poetry. Her first book, Vesper Sparrows (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize. Late in the Millennium was released in 1989. Rough Music (1995) won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Trapeze (2005) represented her most recent release. She was in the process of completing a fifth volume of poetry that had been scheduled for publication in the fall. Digges also wrote two compelling memoirs, Fugitive Spring (1991) and The Stardust Lounge (2001). In 1995 Digges translated Ballad of the Blood, poems by Cuban dissident poet Maria Elena Cruz Varela. Additionally, she had been the recipient of a number of impressive honors, including grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Your Love Is Like Bad Venison

The musical misunderstandings called mondegreens

The term mondegreen, appropriately enough, has its origin in a mondegreen itself. Author Sylvia Wright coined the term in Harper’s in 1954, after explaining that she thought the lyric “laid him on the green” was “Lady Mondegreen,” in the ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray.” Wright said, “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.” Read More

Faber’s 80th anniversary poetry covers

Next month, Faber & Faber will publish a series of six new hardback editions of twentieth-century poetry, each with a specially commissioned cover.
Read more at CR Blog

Happy birthday Elements of Style, happy birthday to you

Still fashionable after 50 years

In an age of Twitter — when brevity takes on new meaning — the most popular guide to writing clearly and concisely remains The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. To mark its 50th anniversary today, USA TODAY compiles facts about the 'little book' that The New Yorker editor David Remnick says "never seems to go out of date."

Tina Fey Is a bookaneer

Via Jezebel

Wild Dogs

Six strangers gather every evening at the edge of the woods calling their dogs to come back to them, beloved dogs that have joined a wild pack and don't respond to this needy chorus. Kingston Ontario author, Helen Humphreys, tells us about these people who can't face their loss. This is a novel about loneliness and a fear of what lies within us all. One's heart, like a household pet, can turn feral and this creates enormous anxiety. Humphreys articulates the profound connection between people and their dogs. I was drawn to the diverse characters in this story, all of them lacking something essential, and couldn't put it down until I was finished.

Smell of Books

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.


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Eudora Welty as Photographer

Photographs by Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Eudora Welty display the empathy that would later infuse her fiction.

The World Digital Library

Gallery: The World Digital Library

"Libraries and archives from around the world have come together in a project to share their collections of rare books, maps, films, manuscripts and recordings online for free. The World Digital Archive will function in seven languages and include content in additional languages."

The Jack Kerouac Archive

Treasures of The New York Public Library Video Series

A Family Daughter

Religion, incest and gay sex - oh my! Maile Meloy's second novel about the Santerre family is wide ranging. The story begins with a little girl with chicken pox staying with her grandparents. All of a sudden she grows up and has a sexual relationship with her uncle, said uncle has a relationship with an heiress named Saffron, they all end up in Argentina. Enter an Eastern European whore, a supposed orphan, a French lover and complications ensue, not all of them plausible. In fact the novel resembles a soap opera. When I started reading A Family Daughter I thought it would be an old fashioned American novel but it morphed into something else, I'm not sure what exactly. Too many viewpoints, at least in my view. Nonetheless I read it and enjoyed it. Not a keeper though.

Hans Christian Andersen's Blog

Hans Christian Andersen's Tumblr-like collections of images and words at the Odense museum.

Seen at Fed by Birds

Fiction's most dysfunctional families

Julie Myerson's new novel about her own family's schism is making headlines at the moment, but domestic traumas have always been a literary staple. Find out how messed up your reading habits are by taking this therapeutic quiz.