Capsule temporelle

"[…] Pages from the working notebooks, the 'Cahiers,' are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that [Marcel] Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down.
     On one notebook page, he’s drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits (Proust looks to have been a capable, imaginative draftsman) that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction. Next to the collage, he has drawn a female face, which, the gallery note tells us, represents the genesis of Albertine. One wonders if it’s true. If so, it’s all the more enchanting to behold. On another page, he has written the heading 'Swann et le Monde,' followed by the words 'Swann cependant n’avait pas complètement abandonné le monde' ('Nevertheless, Swann hadn’t completely abandoned the world'), which offer a different kind of palpable thrill."

— Mary Hawthorne, The New Yorker
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"floating petri dish"

"This summer, you can take a cruise featuring more than sun-kissed college kids, waterslides and black tie dinners. Instead, vacationers who cruise on the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 on Aug. 15 will set sail with author Margaret Atwood as she promotes her most recent book, 'MaddAddam,' just before its official release.
     The third book in Atwood’s trilogy that includes Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood will be published on Sept. 3. The science fiction work will conclude the MaddAddam trilogy and will continue the story of the Crakers, a bio-engineered species that is the only surviving species following a man-made plague."

— Taylor Malmsheimer, New York Daily News
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"In February, an engine fire crippled the Triumph, turning what was supposed to be a four-day cruise into an eight-day debacle and public relations nightmare for Carnival. CNN covered the story of the ship, which floated for five days in the Gulf of Mexico without power or working toilets, as an epic breaking news event, taking live calls from stranded passengers and referring to the ship to as a 'floating petri dish.' The Triumph had more than 4,200 people on board (including crew and passengers)."
— Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News
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"Noroviruses like cruise ships. Current and recent passengers on two Princess Cruise Lines ships can now attest to this personally.
     More than 200 people on the Ruby Princess and the Crown Princess, both bound for South Florida, were reporting gastrointestinal illnesses, company officials told Associated Press on Saturday. Those officials blamed a norovirus.
     Noroviruses are no cause for hysteria, but they’re far from pleasant, causing vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. They can also cause a low fever, headaches and muscle aches, but for folks cooped up in tiny cabins, aches are the least of their troubles."
— Los Angeles Times
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Buy germ-free copies of all of Margaret Atwood's books here...

It's a jungle out there: Part 2

From: Wikimedia Commons via Great Writers Inspire

"On Thursday, Otis Chandler, the CEO of Goodreads, cheerily posted, 'Today I’m really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads. We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them.'
     Many of the 16 million Goodreads users probably thought of different analogies than 'joining the family.' How about 'being swallowed by an anaconda after being squeezed to death'? Or my initial response on Twitter: '"Joins" Ha. Ha. Good one. Like Poland "joined" The Third Reich.'
     [...] In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce.'"
— Rob Spillman, Salon
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To be read

 "Most readers, I think, will by now have seen the 'Medieval Helpdesk' sketch from Norweigan TV, where an exasperated monk requires assistance to start working with a new-fangled and daunting 'book.'
     It's fun – if loopily anachronistic, the codex having been around since the 1st century AD. But it does rest on a presumption that I'm increasingly beginning to question: that technological changes to the way we read affect only the secondary, cosmetic and non-essential aspects of reading. There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case of quipu – is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it's time to think about the real fundamentals."
— The Guardian
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Hot Off The Press

From: Wrong Side of the Art!

"It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if, a decade or two from now, some prominent novelist or cultural tastemaker were to amend Virginia Woolf ’s iconic 1923 claim — 'On or about December, 1910, human character changed' — to something like 'On or about November, 2012, the climate changed.'
     Certainly near-future novelists will feature the relationship between humans and the environment more centrally than do most current writers. The seas are rising and the seasons are unraveling: It is inevitable that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes. Indeed, as our climate becomes ever less certain and more hostile, we might expect our fiction to start resembling the highly ironic, world-weary works that emerged from Woolf ’s war-stricken generation."
— Stephanie Bernhard, The New Inquiry
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Shakespeare Shakeout

"A group of 22 of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars have come together to produce a book that details what they consider to be definitive evidence that the Bard really did write his own plays.

     Since the 1850s, 77 people have been suggested as the likely author, with Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere – the 17th Earl of Oxford – and Christopher Marlowe the most popular candidates, and Queen Elizabeth I among the most outlandish. The academics feel the anti-Shakespeare campaign has intensified lately, and that the elevation of Shakespeare authorship studies to master's degree status has been the final straw."
— Dalya Alberge, The Guardian
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See a related article here…

And here...

" A story begins as a blind groping in the dark [...]"

"I don't think Alice Munro would care to be called my hero, or anyone's. And yet she is the writer whose female characters I feel the most kinship with. Whether she is a feminist writer or not, Munro has said: 'I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn't know. I don't see things all put together that way.'"
— Nell Freudenberger, The Guardian

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"In his 2004 New York Times review of Alice Munro’s Runaway, author Jonathan Franzen painted himself into a corner by bluntly stating what has likely occurred to most reviewers of Munro’s work: 'Runaway is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here. Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.'"
— Quill & Quire
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Buy all of Alice Munro's books here... just an hour's drive from Lake Huron and the region of Ontario where most of her stories are set.