An end-of-the-month round-up of links that lead to interesting things happening in the world of literature and pop culture.
- “At the scary, broken heart of each of these three novels stands a woman of tremendous courage. It’s a quality she—each of these three very different “shes”—will need in order to face the horrors bent on destroying her. Also marking each heroine is a possibly fatal flaw that draws the monstrous entities in her direction with implacable magnetism. ” |
“Haunted Heroines Take on the Supernatural,” via BookPage.
- “Earlier in the night, Miranda talked about the real Alexander Hamilton, whom he met through reading Ron Chernow’s biography. Miranda paraphrased the section that caught his eye: “’I may be said to be building castles in the air and I hope you won’t think less of me. But we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude by saying that I wish there was a war.”’ … that’s the best musical theater character you can hope for.” |
“‘Hamilton’s’ Lin-Manuel Miranda freestyles while Chris Jones beatboxes in Chicago,” via the Chicago Tribune.
- “In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach ‘inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.'” |
From The New Yorker, “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker” – Cohen’s new album, You Want It Darker, will be available to reserve in the catalog.
- “Yet perhaps the most interesting departure from Shakespeare’s plot in Atwood’s Hag-Seed is the author’s development of The Tempest’s prison metaphor. In writing of prison, Atwood returns to a theme and metaphor she used before in Alias Grace.” |
From Karen Newman’s review of Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed. Links embedded in the quote are directed to those titles in the NOBLE catalog.
- “There used to be parties in the apartments on the top floors of New York City’s branch libraries. On other nights, when the libraries were closed, the kids who lived there might sit reading alone among the books or roll around on the wooden library carts—if they weren’t dusting the shelves or shoveling coal. Their hopscotch courts were on the roof. A cat might sneak down the stairs to investigate the library patrons.” |
“Inside the New York Public Library’s Last, Secret Apartment” (Interested in Atlas Obscura? Place a hold!)
-
“While actual news evaporated, the Ripper brand flourished like a franchise. Fictionalized accounts had been published from the get-go — the earliest being John Francis Brewer’s The Curse Upon Mitre Square, published in October of 1888, while the murders were still taking place.” |
“The Jack the Ripper Content Economy” – via The Awl
