Load up Instapaper! Conor Friedersdorf just published his annual list of the best nonfiction writing from 2011. The list is so good, I’m not even sure where you should start, but you probably can’t go wrong making an effort to work through all 101 pieces.
You know what’s fairly remarkable? I’ve never actually read The Phantom Tollbooth. Somehow, I just never read it as a kid. And I’ve decided after reading this New Yorker retrospective to finally remedy that failure in my life. It’s a commonplace of scholarship to insist that children’s literature came of age when it began to [...]
From Open Culture: Set for release on October 4th, The Magic of Reality will be unlike any book written by Richard Dawkins before. It is illustrated for starters, and largely geared toward young and old readers alike. Perfect, he says, for anyone 12 and up. When it comes to the structure and gist of the book, Dawkins does a [...]
Do yourself a favor: stop what you’re doing and go read “The Last Post” by Derek Miller and then go call every single person you love and tell them. Life is too short and this gave me a basket full of emotional weepies.
There’s nothing better than a good whodunit for a Saturday afternoon. In this case, it’s even better, because the story of a Florida woman found raped and beaten in a ditch (and with no memory of the events to boot), is a true crime story from Mark Bowden. After a woman living in a hotel [...]
Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book is called Tree of Codes and it takes a monumental act of artistic hubris to publish a book (maybe I’m surprised such a literary heavyweight would release such an experimental piece of work?) wherein he took his favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz (the Brothers Quay [...]
