DA LEGGERE
"The Pura Principle", il bellissimo racconto di Junot Diaz sul New Yorker .

E l'intervista a Diaz, "Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel. As for my approach to writing, with the passing of time I need to steep longer and longer in my characters before they make any sense to me, before I can even begin to write about them. Which is a bad sign. I already write so damn slow. I guess I need to be possessed by my characters wholly, utterly, before I can put a word down..." bookbench.

NONFICTION
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books). Qual è la ricetta giusta per la scuola? slate.


DA LEGGERE
L'intervista a Spike Lee sul suo nuovo documentario su New Orleans, slate.

Perché soffriamo il solletico? slate.

DA LEGGERE
Cinque anni fa Lawrence H. Summers, il presidente di Harvard aveva scandalizzato il mondo accademico e non, dicendo che le donne erano costituzionalmente meno brave in matematica. Ora, sotto la presidenza di Drew Gilpin Faust, la prima donna presidente di Harvard, le cose sono cambiate. "Universitywide, slightly more than a quarter of Harvard faculty members are women, an all-time high, with the senior faculty accounting for most of the increase. Women also lead the engineering school, the law school, the education school, Harvard College and the Radcliffe Institute. And while Harvard extended 4 of its 32 tenure offers to women in the year before Dr. Summers’s speech, last year, tenure offers went to 16 women and 25 men." nyt.

NOTIZIE

Magnum in Motion è una biblioteca online che presenta in video le foto migliori dell'archivio di Magnum Photo, organizzate tematicamente. inmotion.magnumphotos.

DA LEGGERE
James Wood che critica Barthes per criticare David Shields - Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf), il libro di cui si parla di più ora in America - per criticare il nuovo romanzo di Chang-Rae Lee, The Surrendered (Riverhead). newyorker.

DA VEDERE
Charles Addams's New York al Museum of the City of New York.

Pasolini legge a Ezra Pound:

DA LEGGERE
"The triumphant conclusion of Avatar, by contrast [con il mondo di Oz], takes the form of a permanent abandonment of the gray world of Homo sapiens—which, as Dorothy learns, may contain its own hidden marvels—for the Technicolor, over-the-rainbow fantasy world into which Jake accidentally strayed... The message of what is now James Cameron's most popular movie thus far ... is by contrast, that "reality" is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colorful trip over the rainbow, you don't have to wake up. There's no need for home. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, Avatar is very much a movie for our time." Daniel Mendelsohn, nybooks.

NOTIZIE
The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). utexas.

FICTION
Hanif Kureishi, Collected Stories (Faber). Raccolta dei racconti dal 1997 ad ora. g/o.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Faber). Ishiguro debutta nel genere short story. g/o.

Jodi Picoult, House Rules (Atria). Il nuovo romanzo di Picoult ha un ragazzo autistico come protagonista. bg.

NONFICTION
Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue. How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper). Non sottovalutiamo i bibliotecari. nytbr.

DA LEGGERE
Walmart o Whole Food? Corby Kummer spiega come Walmart, la catena di supermercati supereconomici americana, sia passato al biologico. theatlantic.

Watching Shrek in Tehran, quel che si vede e non si vede al cinema in Iran. believermag.

L'intervista a Charlyne Yi, simpatica comica e molto altro. believermag.

Colm Tóibín su due scrittori libanesi immigrati in America, Rabih Alameddine e Rawi Hage. nybooks.

PAROLE
cybrarian: A cybrarian is a library and information science professional that specializes in using the Internet as a resource tool.

DA VEDERE
Christopher Hitchens e la sua edizione rivista e corretta dei 10 comandamenti:

NOTIZIE
E' morto Barry Hannah "... an artist who pursued a searing, uncompromising kind of writing in a deeply middle-class and Southern way, waiting at the keyboard, the fishing hole, the diner — through many years with a bottle and maybe a firearm hidden under the driver’s seat — for what he called his “lucky” bolts of inspiration to strike." Randy Kennedy lo ricorda sul nyt.

DA LEGGERE
Cathleen Schine, "Austenolatry", sulla mostra su Jane Austen, "A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy" alla Morgan Library di New York. nybooks.

Proust Questionnaire, Martin Scorsese, "Which words or phrases do you most overuse? I use the word “wonderful” too much. I picked this up from cinematographer Michael Chapman. During Taxi Driver, checking a shot, I asked him, “Do you think that’s O.K., with such and such?” He answered, “Oh, that’s wonderful, don’t touch it.” And I thought the word “wonderful” was an odd way to describe a shot of the squalor of a city street. I found I enjoyed the expression “wonderful”—it’s actually a wonderful word. But I’ve used it too much since 1975 and I’m trying to cut back." Meraviglioso, no? vanityfair

INTERVISTE
The Rumpus intervista Sam Lipsyte sul suo ultimo libro, The Ask (FS&G).

NOTIZIE
Gli autori di Logicomix hanno scritto un graphic novel su Lévi-Strauss e lo strutturalismo. ft.

Perché Dave Eggers è odiato? "Dave Eggers is a thorn in many a side in today’s America, my own included. His bizarre combination of fame, enthusiasm and sentimentalizing drives a lot of people up a tree. It’s safe to say that Eggers is currently the most detested man in American haute-literary circles." Maria Bustillos, theawl.

Quanto costa veramente un e-book? nyt.

Frontline, i documentari/inchiesta della PBS (Public Broadcastin Service) ora si possono vedere online. pbs.


snowy new york

FICTION
Rose Tremain, Trespass (Chatto & Windus). Al centro del romanzo ci sono un fratello e una sorella francesi, piuttosto strani e malmessi, nati dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale. g/o.

David Hughes, Walking the Dog (Jonathan Cape). Le passeggiate quotidiane di Hughes con il suo cane Dexter. g/o.

NONFICTION
Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (FS&G). Spassoso libro in cui Batuman, giovane docente di letteratura russa a Standford, parla delle esilaranti vicende legate ai suoi studi. slate.

BAMBINI
Jason Shiga, Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities (Amulet Books). “Crazy + Genius = Shiga” offre 3856 finali alla sua storia. sfc.

DA LEGGERE
"But I have since come to realize that my abject ignorance was really a gift: to be a literarily inclined illiterate at age 26 is one of the most glorious fates that can befall mortal girl." Cathleen Schine, I Was a Teenage Illiterate, nytbr.