This morning, we spotted a few gorgeous photographs of Coco Chanel’s book-filled salon over at Book Patrol, and it got us to thinking about that much-romanticized, often revived tradition of thinkers from centuries past: the literary salon. For your daydreaming pleasure, we’ve collected a few paintings and photographs of famous literary salons from the 1600s to the 1970s. … Read More
Gertrude Stein
The 10 Grumpiest Authors in Literary History
The new issue of The Believer features an interview with the late Maurice Sendak. Inspired by his “legendary crossness,” we’ve rounded up a list of the grumpiest authors of all… Read More
15 Postcards from Famous Authors
Summer may seem like the ideal postcard-writing season, what with cruises and camp, but we’ve always been most inspired to write them in the fall, when the leaves are changing and we’re feeling wistful. So to amp up that wistful feeling a bit — and since as you’ve probably noticed, we just can’t get enough of ogling literary ephemera — we went on the hunt for interesting postcards written by famous authors, from Jack Kerouac to Franz Kafka to Rainer Maria Rilke. Click through and admire the penmanship, doodles, and forceful words of a few of your favorite… Read More
Are These the 10 Most Difficult Books?
We’ve all been beaten by a book before, whether due to its crazy length, disturbing subject matter, or intimidating reputation. Over at Publishers Weekly, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, co-curators of The Millions’ long-running “Difficult Books” series, recently compiled an interesting list of what they deem to be “the most difficult of the most difficult.” While they missed two of our personal “literary Mount Everests” — Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest — there are definitely a few books on here that we’ve picked up only to put down in defeat. Click through to see which titles made their top 10, check out the reasoning behind their picks here, and then head to the comments to share tales of the books that nearly broke you! … Read More
15 of the Greatest Lists in Literature
This week, Threaded reminded us of one of our favorite moments in Joan Didion’s The White Album — when she lists her packing list, incredibly simple and yet so revealing. Lists, of course, are no rare thing in literature, and have many uses, from adding quirk to showing off knowledge, and have storied positions in classic texts like The Faerie Queene (so many different kinds of trees) and The Illiad (200+ lines of Greek chieftains). Inspired by Didion, we spent some time thinking about our favorite lists in literature, from short to impossibly long, from lists that catalogue items to those that follow the train of imagination. Click through to check out the literary lists we think are the funniest, most revealing, most interesting or flat out strangest, and if we’ve missed your own favorite, tell us about it in the comments. And yes, it does not escape us that this is a list of lists. Meta is the way we like it.
… Read More
25 Writers, Artists and Critics on James Joyce
In case you haven’t been trolling the literary blogs in the past week, we are happy to inform you that today is Bloomsday, the unofficial international holiday dedicated to canonical Irish writer James Joyce, and more specifically, to his most famous work, Ulysses. Though he has many enthusiastic fans (the man died over 70 years ago and still has young ladies dancing in the streets once a year to celebrate his life), he has always been a controversial figure in critical and social circles. For our own mini celebration of Bloomsday, we’ve put together a collection of some of our favorite quotes about the great writer and his work — some so flattering they read like silver-tongued worship, and some, well, significantly less flattering. Click through to read a cacophony of famous figures sounding off on James Joyce, and then get out there and decide on his merit for yourself. … Read More
The Childhood Homes of 20 Famous Authors
Famous authors — they’re just like us. Or at least they used to be. Recently, on a whim, we started investigating the childhood homes of some legendary authors, and their early homes are just as varied as their writing styles — from cottages to apartments to antebellum townhouses. We think it’s rather fascinating to peer at some of our favorite authors’ earliest dwellings and think about the formative experiences they had there, whether for good or ill, and the way those houses and neighborhoods might have influenced their writing. Also, it’s just fun to pry. Click through to check out our collection of famous authors’ childhood homes, and if you like, add to our collection in the comments. … Read More
Advice Columns By Famous Authors We’d Love to Read
This week, we’re diving into Augusten Burroughs’ newest book, a stellar series of essays meant to be a cheeky version of a self-help book, blessed with the unwieldy but hilarious title This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. While we’re thankful for Burroughs’ ”instruction manual for living,” it got us thinking about the other authors we wish would give us some advice — whether in self-help book or advice column form — and what they might write about. Click through to see our dream literary advice-givers, and let us know whose column you’d flip to first in the comments. … Read More
The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories
1. The four artists on the shortlist for Britain’s $65,000 Turner Prize have been announced, and surprisingly, there’s not a painter in the entire bunch; Luke Fowler and Elizabeth Price are both filmmakers, Paul Noble is the creator of “a dystopic fictional metropolis called Nobson Newtown” that’s populated by human figures drawn as excrement, and… Read More
Meet the Famous Residents of Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery
Editor’s note: This post by Benjamin Waldman was originally featured on Untapped Cities, a Flavorwire partner site. Read more from his ongoing series on the cemeteries of Paris here.
Père Lachaise was established in 1804 and is located at 16, rue du Repos. It was named after Père François de la Chaise, the confessor to Louis XIV, who lived on the site. Unfortunately, the cemetery was not an immediate success. Parisians were wary of being buried in a new cemetery, especially one not consecrated by the church. In order to remedy this situation, the cemetery managed to secure the remains of La Fontaine and Molière and transferred them to the cemetery in 1804. Another public relations move occurred in 1817, when the remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery. They were interred under a canopy made from fragments of the Abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine. Also of note are the Holocaust memorials, the Mur des Fédérés (Communards’ Wall), the lipstick stained tomb of Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison’s grave. … Read More
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