Wednesday Links

I’m back from 5 days in NYC. Has anyone gone to the American Museum of Natural History recently? I haven’t been in almost 20 years. They’ve redone all of the dinosaur exhibits and they’re great. I had a far better experience there than at the newly redone MoMA (not that I didn’t enjoy the MoMA, they’re just…well different). Dioramas galore! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading on the web the past few days.

  • An interesting article in the Globe about the ephemera Sara Theriault of Lorem Ipsum finds left behind in the used books she sells. Also mentioned is one of my colleagues here:

    Across town, Hilary Brant, the used-book buyer for the Harvard Book Store, isn’t so lucky. ”We haven’t lost interest” in displaying items found in books, she says, ”but we’ve run out of wall space.” Brant especially likes items evocative of a particular era, like photos of men from the ’60s wearing long hair and polyester. Taking home what she finds in books is a perk of her job. ”It’s the poor man’s antique collection,” she says.

  • Some idiot has decided to make a biopic of fictitious author J.T. Leroy. Great. That’s just great.
  • I had to drop Survey of Western Art my freshman year of college, but not before it was too late to return the doorstop that was the textbook, History of Art. I held onto that book for years—I had spent so much money on it. It moved from apartment to apartment, until I just couldn’t look at it anymore. Seems there’s a new and improved edition coming soon, according to this article. It’s interesting to hear about how they chose what artists to cut.
  • The Morning News has announced the brackets and judges (not me again dammit) of their Tournament of Books. The Tournament begins in two weeks.
  • Bookdwarf favorite Laila Lalami has written a review of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend for the March 20th edition of The Nation and a review of Amitav Ghosh’s Incendiary Circumstances for the Sunday Oregonian.
  • The National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced.
  • Scott Esposito has posted the Winter 2006 edition of The Quarterly Conversation, which includes essays, book reviews, and interviews.
  • The new issue of Context from the Center for Book Culture is available online. This issue includes essays by Dubravka Ugresic and William Gass.
  • The Orange Prize longlist has been announced. I’ve only read three of them embarassingly enough, but several of them have been on my TBR pile for a while. I think everyone should just stop publishing books for a year, so we can all catch up on our reading.
  • I’ve just started reading the excellent Words Without Borders blog, which includes Dalkey Archive’s Chad Post writing about the London Book Fair. Funny stuff.
  • I received my copy of the new literary journal A Public Space, edited by Brigid Hughes(ex-Paris Review editor). It looks great—fiction by Kelly Link, Charles D’Ambrosio (whose short story collection I am half way through and loving), Haruki Murakami, Rick Moody, Yoko Ogawa, Motoyuki Shibata, John Haskell, and Lucy Raven to name a few.