TOBI'S DESK

Thanks to the Burney Centre at McGill University in Montreal, readers can now browse a virtual version of Jane Austen ’s library. “ Reading with Austen ” allows users to page through antique books and even read marginalia. Rebecca Rego Barry at Lapham’s Quarterly dives into the new project , noting that “there are books of history, travel, religion, literature, and agriculture, as one would expect from a country-house library a couple of centuries in the making. There are surprises, too, mainly in the amount of contemporary fiction, which was largely disdained at the time. Even more noteworthy, perhaps, are the novels by women, such as Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Turner Smith , that signal the family’s broad-minded reading practices.” Image credit: Cassandra Austen The post What Would Jane Read? appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2KeAEvw

In the late seventies , well into his career as a writer and illustrator, Maurice Sendak began designing sets and costumes for the stage, including productions of The Magic Flute , The Nutcracker , and an opera adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are . Storyboards, sketches, and more from this relatively unheralded portion of his oeuvre comprise the exhibition “ Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet ,” which is on display at The Morgan Library and Museum through October 6. Fans of Sendak’s books will recognize in his theater designs the distinctive creatures and critters that haunt all his work, the unnerving but delightful processions they form, the mischief and wonder—and wildness—alive in their eyes. A selection of images from the show appears below. Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), Design for show scrim (The Magic Flute) , 1979–1980, watercolor and graphite pencil on paper on board. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation. The Morgan Library and Museu

Jamie Allen is the creator of the Squirrel Census, a data, science, design, and storytelling team. With the help of 323 volunteer Squirrel Sighters, the six-person team performed a count of eastern grays in Central Park in October 2018. In June of this year, they released the Central Park Squirrel Census 2019 Report . When you put on a squirrel census, you get asked a lot of questions. One of the most popular is, Why? In an era marred by gaslighting, climate change, and ill temper, it’s almost as if the act of tallying squirrels becomes the one hunk of gristle that people can’t swallow. But it’s time to answer the difficult questions. “Wait a minute— why ?” is the query that aims for the project’s jugular. Though the Squirrel Census team had completed several counts of eastern grays in Atlanta, some observers couldn’t take us seriously when we set our sights on Manhattan’s Central Park in October of 2018. It may astound you, but there has never before been a comprehensive count o

“Prosody, and orthography, are not parts of grammar, but diffused like the blood and spirits throughout the whole.” — Ben Jonson , English Grammar (1617) Erasmus , author of The Praise of Folly and the most erudite, learned, and scholarly humanist of the Renaissance, was enraptured by the experience, by the memory, by the very idea of Venice. For 10 months from 1507 to 1508, Erasmus would be housed in a room of the Aldine Press, not far from the piazzas of St. Mark’s Square with their red tiles burnt copper by the Adriatic sun, the glory and the stench of the Grand Canal wafting into the cell where the scholar would expand his collection of 3,260 proverbs entitled Thousands of Adages , his first major work. For Venice was the home to a “library which has no other limits than the world itself;” a watery metropolis and an empire of dreams that was “building up a sacred and immortal thing.” Erasmus composed to the astringent smell of black ink rendered from the resin of gall nuts, t

John Vincler’s column “Brush Strokes” examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.  Mark Bradford, Black Venus , 2005. © Mark Bradford (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth) Photo: Bruce White Writing about art is often linked to the timely—the current exhibition, the just-released catalogue. The need for an immediate response makes fast what should be slow, and focusing on the continuously new can distort the experience of art. I want to attempt a subversion of this by thinking about the first time I saw the paintings of the Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford, now almost a decade ago. I want to revisit a moment before I thought I could write about art, to locate the moment when the looking deepened. There is a risk inherent in what I want to attempt here, primarily memory’s frailty: what have I forgotten and what have I embellished? My goal is to recollect not just the work of an artist but the moment when the way I thought about a

Over the course of several books, Juliet Escoria has shown a remarkable ability to portray uncomfortable situations and elicit visceral emotions. Her audacious debut novel, Juliet the Maniac , vividly portrays a teenage girl caught in a downward spiral of mental illness and self-destruction. It’s rightfully collected accolades from across the literary map: Publishers Weekly called it “searing and intimate” and NPR praised it as “a nightmare journal of the space between girlhood and womanhood.” The New York Times noted that “Juliet’s level of general intensity can make Martin Amis characters read like prudes.” It’s easy to get swept up in the work’s raw immediacy and overlook Escoria’s prodigious literary skills. She draws on autofiction techniques, but bends them to her own needs. Among the drugs, sex, and suicide attempts, she carefully modulates the tone so there are also moments of connection and tenderness. Escoria and I talked about the novel for several hours online. I sta

Wọlé Ṣóyínká has long been the preeminent scholar on D. O. Fágúnwà, the great Yorùbá-language writer two of whose books, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons (Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalè) and The Forest of Olodumare (Igbó Olódùmarè), he translated. This August, to mark Ṣóyínká’s 85th birthday this year, the Fágúnwà Study Group will celebrate the […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2MwmB7d

In today’s installment of featured fiction—curated by our own Carolyn Quimby —we present an excerpt from Miciah Bay Gault ’s novel, Goodnight Stranger , out today from Park Row—and recently longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize . Booklist called Goodnight Stranger “Quietly chilling…A suspenseful meditation on the many ways in which the past, consciously or not, shapes the present.” And George Saunders hailed the book as a “taut, keenly intelligent, and provocative debut…Deeply compelling and enjoyable, suffused with a genuinely thrilling new mode of literary energy.” Goodnight Stranger I left work early. I walked quickly as if chased. I wasn’t sure what I was running from, or to. All I knew was that I couldn’t go home. It hurt my chest in a complicated way to think that somewhere in the house I loved so much was the stranger. I felt a knot of fear inside my ribs, a tough bud threatening to blossom open. Instead of going home, I went to Island Pie and ate two sli

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu. The Paris Review meets The New York Review of Books : our summer subscription deal continues! To celebrate, we’re taking a dive into both of our archives for this week’s Redux. Read on for Toni Morrison’s Art of Fiction interview , paired with her 2001 essay “ On ‘The Radiance of the King’  ”; Mary McCarthy’s Art of Fiction interview , paired with her 1972 essay “ A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés ”; and Ernest Hemingway’s Art of Fiction interview , paired with George Plimpton’s 1980 speech reminiscing about this interview. If you enjoy these free interviews and essays, why not  subscribe to both magazines? From now through the end of August, you’ll pay