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Baz Luhrmann’s kaleidoscopic film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet
INTERPRET THE LUHRMANN WAY
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CONTENTS
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A selection of 6 great poems and the paintings that inspired them.
LITERATURE MEETS ART
We ask some of his fans how they would celebrate with the Bard on his birthday.
IF SHAKESPEARE WERE ALIVE TODAY...
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Sumeet Keswani meets some upcoming poets and understands how they explore the relation between literary writings and social media.
THE NEW POET’S OLD FAVOURITE
British novelist Peter James explains why his Roy Grace detective series is actually literature.
BRITAIN’S RICHARD CASTLE
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............................................................................................. We show you how the literary world has occupied a decent-sized space on the web.
25 BEST WEBSITES FOR LITERATURE LOVERS
Mark Thwaite writes about his own experience as a blogger and how literary blogs have ceased to develop.
WHAT BECAME OF LITERARY BLOGGING
INTERPRET THE LUHRMANN WAY
By Tori E. Godfree Baz Luhrmann’s kaleidoscopic film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, while often leaving much to be desired from the two main actors in the way of delivery, presents a fascinating modern interpretation of the 16th century drama. David Ansen, film critic, describes it as “alternately enrapturing and exhausting, brilliant and glib… “Romeo and Juliet” more for the eyes than the ears.”
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mere glance at the film will show anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the play that the two are ferociously different in terms of setting, costume, casting, music, and props. A closer reading, however, will also illuminate significant deviations in verse. The differences between these two works are distinctly illustrated in Act One, Scene On of the text and its matching film scene. Here Shakespeare’s text shows Samson and Gregory of the house of Capulet exchanging in witty banter: SAMSON: I strike quickly, being moved. GREGORY: But thou art not quickly moved to strike. SAMSON: A dog of the house of Montague moves me (1.1 5-7). They continue their repartee until Abraham and another servingman of the Montagues arrive. Gregory advises, “Draw thy tool. Here comes of the house of Montagues” (1.1 29). Samson responds, “Quarrel, I will back thee” (1.1 30). Gregory suggests that frowning in their general direction will suffice initially. Samson disagrees:
Sir Philip Sidney states in his Apology for Poetry that poetry should both delight and teach, and both the text and the film serve this purpose well - each suited to the time in which they were presented.
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SAMSON: Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them, which is a disgrace to them if they bear it. [He bites his thumb] ABRAHAM: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMSON: I do bite my thumb, sir. ABRAHAM: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMSON [to GREGORY]: Is the law of our said if I say ‘Ay’ GREGORY: No. SAMSON [to ABRAHAM]: No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir. They proceed to argue about whose master is better, and fight until Benvolio arrives and tells them to put up their swords. Tybalt shows up and provokes the fight. Curiously, the corresponding scene from the film shows instead Benvolio and the “Montague boys” cruising along the freeway in a bright yellow convertible, laughing raucously, with one of them turning around to face the camera and yelling: “A dog of the house of Capulet moves me!” They pull up to a gas station, Benvolio goes inside, and immediately afterward arrive Tybalt and the “Capulet boys,” Abraham (here abbreviated to Abra) and another. Tybalt goes inside, but Abra remains next to the car, sees the Montague boys, and faces them with an intimidating glare. The Montague boys quake with fear, and jump when Abra yells, “Boo!” Abra, of course, laughs hysterically and gets back into his car; ready to drive away until he sees one of the Montague boys bite his thumb. The ensuing fight scene provides an excellent example of the difference in choreography and props. In the text, the characters all fight with swords, on a stage empty of all but citizens of the watch. In the ultra-modernized film, the characters are all possessed of pistols bearing the name of their respective houses, and they make use of the surrounding cars, film extras, and various architectural trappings of the gas station where the fight is staged.
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............................................................. Interestingly enough, though, when Benvolio entreats the Capulets and his fellow Montagues to lower their weapons, the wording does not exchange swords for guns, but remains as it reads in the original text (1.1 57). The film’s setting is a cunning twist on the original: instead of Verona, Italy, events take place in a teeming seaside metropolis called Verona Beach (bearing a striking resemblance to modern day Miami) that has been ravaged by the ongoing feud between Capulet and Montague. Verona Beach is a modern-day city, with cars, high-rise buildings, gas stations, and hot dogs stands, none of which were even conceived (or much less, available) during the time that Romeo and Juliet was written or performed. Luhrmann’s costumes are also highly modernized. This opening scene finds the Montague boys parading around in Hawaiian shirts and sporting unnaturally colored hair, while the Capulet boys favor leather and metal-heeled boots. These are some drastic changes from the traditional Elizabethan wear of the time. In addition, the film makes no pretense at any English or Italian (to fit the original setting) accent from its characters. Luhrmann explains that this is because he considers the American language as better attuned to Shakespearian text: “When Shakespeare wrote these plays, they were written for an accent that was much more like an American sound, and when you do Shakespeare with an American accent it makes the language very strong, very alive” (Weinraub). Musically in this act, the audience is provided with modern hip-hop, electric guitar sound effects, a nod to musical themes from spaghetti Western showdowns, and a chorus chanting a direct Latin translation of the play’s prologue.
When Shakespeare wrote these plays, they were written for an accent that was much more like an American sound, and when you do Shakespeare with an American accent it makes the language very strong, very alive.
Luhrmann explains in an interview on the Music Edition of Romeo + Juliet that Shakespeare used all varieties of music to reach the highly varied audience in the Globe Theater: church music, folk music, and popular music of the times. Luhrmann echoes this in his version of the drama. Sidney explains that poetry is the most effective means of instruction, as poetry can “teach… not only by delivering forth his very being, his causes and effects, but also by making known his enemy, vice, which must be destroyed, and his cumbersome servant, passion, which much be mastered” (Duncan-Jones 220). Luhrmann takes Shakespeare’s task of instructing the masses against the folly of absurd family feuds and artfully updates it for the 20th century, retaining its essential moral argument while making it something to which modern audiences can more easily relate.
The movie poster. February 2015
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............................................ British novelist Peter James believes that Macbeth and Hamlet would make good crime fiction novels. In conversation with Ruchi Kumar, he explains why his Roy Grace detective series is actually literature.
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BRITAIN’S Ruchi Kumar – Hello Peter! Welcome to India. Lets begin with your inclination towards writing crime fiction than proper literary pieces. Tell us about it. Peter James- A lot of people think they’re different. My argument to that is, I write crime fiction because I like to look through the eyes of the police, and as a writer, the human condition intrigues me. RK- What are you doing in India? PJ – I am in India to promote my latest Roy Grace book, Dead Man’s Time, and to attend Literature Live! , the literature festival in Mumbai. RK - Since when have you been writing? PJ - I have been writing since I was seven or eight, but I never thought anybody would want to read any of my works. I even wrote three novels as a teenager, but luckily for me they never got published! RK – What interests you apart from crime? PJ - I have always had a fascination with the supernatural. I have even lived in two haunted houses. There was this one incident when one of my books caught fire; it just combusted on its own. My first real break came with the book Possessions, which just exploded. It topped the lists in England, and went on to be translated in 26 different languages.
RK – Where did you find your inspiration to write about crime? PJ – The work of police and detectives intrigued me. Brighton, where I grew up in has the reputation of being the crime capital of the UK. As a writer, I realised that nobody gets to see the human life as intricately as a cop. RK – So did you ever go and investigate a real crime scene? PJ – A lot of time the cops phone me up and let me know if they are going on a raid or if they’ve found a body and ask me tag along. A lot of his writings are inspired from true stories shared with him by the cops. RK – What is your new book about? PJ - The new book Dead Man’s Time is the story of an actual event that happened in New York in 1920. In fact, the character of Roy Grace is also inspired from a real life homicide detective from Brighton. RK – Tell us about your family. I hear you have met the Queen. PJ – My mother, a refugee from Vienna made gloves for the Queen, and his sisters have carried on making their family the Queen’s go-to glove makers. I even visited the queen Last year when I was there for Charles Dicken’ centennial anniversary, I asked her what she likes to read, and she said my problem is that I have so many official papers to read, I don’t get a chance to read anything else.
RICHARD CASTLE
RK – Who would be your favourite author? PJ - Graham Green! He wrote this book that made me want to be writer; called Brighton Rock. It is the first crime novel that really broke all the rules. RK - Have you ever considered writing for any TV shows or movies? PJ - I did go on to write for television in Canada and later even wrote small-budget movies that were trashed by film critics. Barry Norman called one of my comedy films, Spanish Fly, the worst British films since the Second World War, and the least funny British film ever made! RK – What does the future hold for you? PJ - The completion of a work in progress about God. The book revolves around the premise of what would happen if somebody could claim to have an absolute proof of God’s existence. I have been working on it for close to two decades now, and I am hoping to have it out soon.
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IF SHAKESPEARE WERE ALIVE TODAY... JEREMY HUNT MP
ANN WIDDECOMBE MP
I would invite him to Prime Minister’s Questions and ask him whether he thinks politicians can be inspired with the noble ideals of Henry V or Othello, or are forever destined to lie in the gutter with Macbeth and Brutus.
I would take him to the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park and buy him some mulled wine in the interval. A Midsummer Night’s Dream would greatly amuse him or perhaps Twelfth Night. I think he would thoroughly approve of the way we render his comedies today.
Shadow Culture Secretary
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GREG HICKS
DOMINIC DROMGOOLE
We’d start in Stratford . I’d invite him to watch me play Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, which would be a huge honour – for me! Then we’d drive to London in a Mercedes, with blacked out windows and straight to the British Film Theatre to watch Ran, an interpretation of Lear by the Japanese filmmaker, Kurosawa. I’d love to know his take on these two phenomena of the twentieth-century.We would have dinner at the Oxo Tower restaurant. I’d order him a Caipirinha, a Brazilian cocktail. He wouldn’t have tried one of these before. Then we’d hit some seriously good red wine. I’d hope to get him drunk enough to ask him if he wrote all his plays single handedly, or if he had some help. If he said he had some help, I’d let him pick up the bill.
I would invite him to our first night of Romeo and Juliet. He would probably hang around the piazza, occasionally darting in and out of the tiring house to talk to the actors, peeking through the grilles in the onstage doors to watch the audience response, then nip back outside to chat and drink with the stage crew. Then when the audience pour out, he would briefly hide until they had cleared, then join the actors for drinking and partying. He would get gloriously pissed, enjoying the actor's stories of triumphs and disasters through their careers, and chipping in with several of his own. Then somewhere close to dawn, he would disappear into the damp and chill Thames air, and back to the private place that enchants and eludes us.
Actor, currently playing Leontes in the RSC’s production of The Winter’s Tale
Artistic director of the Globe Theatre
By Elizabeth Kirkwood People often like to suggest what Shakespeare would do if he were alive today, but what about what you would do with him? We ask some of his fans how they would celebrate with the Bard on his birthday.
A. C. GRAYLING
JOHN MULLAN
I’d like to invite him home to a small friendly dinner, with my wife, Katie Hickman, so that we could have a really good chat. I would cook a couple of capons and a plum pudding, and roll out a butt of malmsey. We would quiz him about his work, his life, and his times - what a delight it would be to know more about them all.
I would take him on a day trip to Italy . If you count the Roman plays, a third of his dramatic works were set wholly or partly in Italy, a place he only knew from books. If you were energetic you could do Verona (Two Gentlemen, Romeo and Juliet), Padua (Taming of the Shrew) and Venice (Merchant, Othello) in a day. He would see that his romance with Italy was more than justified.
Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College
Professor of English, University College, London
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Literature meets
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ART
A selection of 6 great poems and the paintings that inspired them.
The Starry Night,
Anne Sexton (1961) The town does not exist except where one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die. It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon bulges in its orange irons to push children, like a god, from its eye. The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die: into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry.
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Cézanne’s Ports,
Allen Ginsberg (1950)
In the foreground we see time and life swept in a race toward the left hand side of the picture where shore meets shore. But that meeting place isn’t represented; it doesn’t occur on the canvas. For the other side of the bay is Heaven and Eternity, with a bleak white haze over its mountains. And the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between for minute rowboats.
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Nude Descending a Staircase, X. J. Kennedy (1961)
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, A gold of lemon, root and rind, She sifts in sunlight down the stairs With nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister A constant thresh of thigh on thigh-Her lips imprint the swinging air That parts to let her parts go by. One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair Collects her motions into shape.
The Disquieting Muses, Sylvia Plath (1957)
Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt Or what disfigured and unsightly Cousin did you so unwisely keep Unasked to my christening, that she Sent these ladies in her stead With heads like darning-eggs to nod And nod and nod at foot and head And at the left side of my crib?
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Actaeon,
George Szirtes (2012) O, my America, my Newfoundland John Donne, “Elegy 20” O, my America, discovered by slim chance, behind, as it seemed, a washing line I shoved aside without thinking – does desire have thoughts or define its object, consuming all in a glance? You, with your several flesh sinking upon itself in attitudes of hurt, while the dogs at my heels growl at the strange red shirt under a horned moon, you, drinking night water – tell me what the eye steals or borrows. What can’t we let go without protest? My own body turns against me as I sense it grow contrary.
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842)
She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The curse is come upon me,” cried The Lady of Shalott.
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There is a certain romance to the sight of poetry set in vintage typewriter font on a yellowing scrap of paper marked by stains of coffee. Transfer the idea on to social media and it becomes an altogether new literature-meetsart form. Sumeet Keswani meets some upcoming poets and understands how they explore the relation between literary writings and social media.
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rising number of young poets are now using the almostextinct typewriter to write out poems, photographing these and posting them on networking sites like Instagram and Facebook. This typewritten poetry now has huge following across the world and in India. Some of the biggest names in Instagram typed poetry such as Christopher Poindexter and Tyler Knott Gregson have over one lakh followers — in the fickle virtual world they command a rare loyalty among poetry lovers. No one is quite sure who set the trend in motion. But the art seems to be redefining poetry for a generation that has the world’s literature at its fingertips. Yash Pandit, 16, is a young poet from Mumbai who has 2,100 followers on Instagram for his typewritten poetry. “My inspirations on Instagram are Gregson and Poindexter,” he says. Pandit started following in his idols’ footsteps by using a smartphone app that included a typewriter font. He then bought his first typewriter three months ago to get a feel of the real thing. Rachana Iyer, 25, got her typewriter — a Brother Correction 7 — as a gift. “After watching Johnny Depp use a typewriter in Rum Diaries, I wanted one for my poems.
A friend surprised me with one on my birthday three years ago,” she says. Her Facebook page has quickly gathered hundreds of fans and is growing with collaborations. “A friend planted this seed of an idea in my head, telling me that blogs had limited reach today. So I started a Facebook page called Ray’s typewriter diaries,” she says. Armenia-born poet Adelina Sarkisyan sets her verses — often on the paranormal — on a Remington Rand Steamliner typewriter in Los Angeles. She is so fond of her typewriter that she has given it a name — Bogie (after Humphrey Bogart). “I love the authenticity of it: the feel of the keys, the sounds. Bogie was made in the 1930s. I always wonder who used him before me, where he has been and what words he has produced,” says the poet. So what makes this form work better than, say, a blog post? For one, pictures have their own charm. In a news feed littered with random status updates and links to articles, a picture instantly catches the eye. “The typewriter series certainly looks edgy. The unconventional structure of poems is also rather appealing.
It looks more like a string of thoughts instead of a carefully constructed poem. It’s more relatable,” says Ipsita Kabiraj, a student of BA (History) from Presidency University, Kolkata, and a fan of this poetry. Also at play is the short attention span of the online user today. It takes less time and fewer swipes of a finger to scroll through visual poetry on a smartphone than to read an 800-word piece. “As I started sharing pictures of my poetry on Facebook, I realized the shorter ones got more views. Long poems put people off,” says Iyer. An engaging aspect of this Instagram poetry is the effort each poet makes to create individual artwork around the words. Leena Manimekalai, an established poet and filmmaker from Chennai, follows some of these artists on social media and believes that poetry has the unique quality of adapting to various mediums. “Poetry is an extension of cave and rock art. It is as ancient as modern,” she points out. From illustrations to special effects to the texture of the paper used, this poetry offers quite a visual treat.
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“I wanted to send someone a poem titled ‘Desire’ that not only spoke of coffee but also had its aroma.So I coffee-stained the paper before typing on it,” says Iyer. She also collaborated with Fatima, an illustrator she met online. Fatima, who goes by the alias ‘Captain TwinkySpiff of Pathological Pernicious Sparkles’ on Facebook, drew around Iyer’s typewritten poem, ‘She’. Sarkisyan, who has a following of over 3,000, used handmade lokta paper, crafted in Nepal by women’s cooperatives and small enterprises.
Artistic satisfaction aside, does this poetry pay? Iyer says she’s started getting a lot of requests for both — copies of her typewritten poetry and customized poetry — through her FB page. Sarkisyan sells her typewritten poetry on etsy.com. Her dream is to complete her book and become a full-time writer. Pandit’s Instagram page was recently noticed by a new publishing house and the teenager is now set to become an author by 2015. There are problems with the format. Typewriters are near extinct and it is tough getting accessories for the machines.
There are hardly any typewriter repair shops around. Pandit buys his ribbon from online stores but says maintenance and repair are a problem. Also, you have to lug your typewriter around because you never know when inspiration may strike. Iyer, who was born in Mumbai and spent a chunk of her years in the Middle East, has moved often and that has meant leaving behind her typewriter. “It weighs upto 8-9 kg, so I can’t carry it around everywhere.” Her worst fear is running out of ribbon.
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Mark Thwaite is the founder Tof ReadySteadyBook. He writes about his own experience as a blogger and how literary blogs have ceased to develop. He also gives us a peak inside the list of his most favourite literary bloggers and enthusiasts.
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WHAT BECAME OF
Literary Blogging
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started blogging more than 10 years ago, and even then I felt I was late to the game. I’d recently stopped working for Amazon.co.uk and a book review website seemed the best way to keep my contact book live, and keep the review copies coming in. Back then, I felt I was joining a real community of dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles. And, moreover, one I believed had radical possibilities: if the book review pages hadn’t quite shrunk to the pinched state we find them in today, they were hardly in rude and rigorous health. Not only that, but when serious books were reviewed they all seemed to me to be of a type I call Establishment Literary Fiction, the kind of literary fiction that wins prizes, and which mostly leaves me cold. I wanted to review books I felt weren’t being given the credit or publicity they deserved. Writers like Gabriel Josipovici, Gert Hofmann, Enrique Vila-Matas, Peter Handke and Rosalind Belben. Many great blogs focus on genre fiction: the love of vampire epics or raunchy romances, SF or historical fiction. My focus was on “serious literature” – the scare quotes are in place because what is contested as such was also part of the reason to get involved in the fun and the fray of blogging. My hope at the time was that countless blogs would emerge that would prove an untested thesis to which I’d long cleaved: that the attempt by the mainstream media to contain the intelligence of the average reader by trivialising their seriousness could be resisted, and that blogging would prove that readers had far more sophisticated tastes than the broadsheets presume.
Blogging, I hoped, would prove to be the start of a renaissance in long form critical writing … but even committed bloggers like myself found it hard to knock out long, incisive reviews on a daily – or even weekly – basis. Understandably, we often filled our blogs with linkbait. If a nice review or post went up on Monday, perhaps Tuesday and Wednesday would simply be a comment directing our readers to something good elsewhere in the blogosphere. Actually, this felt good. This was OK. This was community-building. Bloggers linked to other blogs and praised other bloggers; the MSM (mainstream media) could be ignored. Then along came Twitter. And, fairly quickly, that blog article linking to another blogger’s excellent article on X, Y or Proust, never came to be written. A link was just tweeted out. And the tweet joined countless others in a maelstrom of posts, very, very many of which pointed readers back to articles in the MSM. Again, for a while, I was optimistic. If the linkbait went from blogs, that surely only left the good stuff. But the linkbait proved to be part of the lifeblood, and blogs started to wither on the vine – mine too for a while. When I started blogging, I felt part of a community that linked and supported and shared, and which, for a moment, seemed like it was really going to jolt the complacency of the MSM. Whilst the number of bloggers has continued to increase, my sense as a blogger is that the renaissance in the literary critical essay that I hoped to see just hasn’t happened.
(In other disciplines the situation is better: the vibrant online philosophy community shows blogs at their best.)There is a wonderful amount of enthusiasm and warmth and energy online on an ever-growing number of great book blogs, but despite the sterling work of some, an army of amateur literary essayists has never arisen. And that rather saddens me. Of the bloggers who do really stand out, my top five are: Stephen Mitchelmore (This Space): Steve understands the form, using his blog to write occasional literary essays of real merit and penetrating insight. David Winters (Why Not Burn Books?): Winters isn’t a blogger but a literary-philosophical critic whose name has turned up on many of the best literary websites and blogs over the last few years. 3:AM magazine: Like any magazine it is patchy but, at its best, it is punchy, intelligent and confrontational, justifying its tagline, “Whatever it is we’re against it”. Flowerville: What is a blog for, what does a good one look like, or do? The truth is we don’t know, but if it is simply an inspiring place that provokes thought and seems to be written by a fellow seeker, then Flowerville gets my vote. Time’s Flow Stemmed: TFS’s About section reads: “To quote Samuel Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy (25 March 1936), ‘I have been reading wildly all over the place. Time’s Flow Stemmed is a notebook ofmy wild readings.’” February 2015
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25 BEST WEBSITES FOR LITERATURE LOVERS It’s an interesting relationship that book lovers have with the Internet: most would rather read a physical book than something on an iPad or Kindle, and even though an Amazon purchase is just two or three clicks away, Dedicated readers would rather take a trip to their local indie bookstore.Yet the literary world occupies a decent-sized space on the web.
Readers, writers, publishers, editors, and everybody in between are tweeting, Tumbling, blogging, and probably even Vineing about their favorite books. In case the demise of Google Reader threw your literary Internet browsing into a dark void, here’s a list of 25 book sites to bookmark.
Issue The Millions The Paris Review daily While the print version of this highly respected literary journal only comes out a few times a year, its blog has become a daily hub for readers thanks to a great mix of news roundups, essays, interviews, and more.
Page Turner Obviously being The New Yorker’s book blog comes with its perks, and Page -Turner takes full advantage of its captive audience by posting everything from the fantastic monthly podcast to a daily news roundup.
The Awl It’s not a literary site in the traditional sense, but The Awl always, always posts something that appeals to book lovers, from great poetry to original essays like “How To Be A Monster: Life Lessons From Lord Byron.”
Ten years is a mighty long time in terms of Internet life, but that’s how long The Millions has been kicking out a steady stream of reviews, essays, and links. That’s what has made it the Internet’s #1 literary institution.
The Los Angeles Review of books Launched via Tumblr in 2011, the LARB has grown from a proclamation that the West Coast has a literary scene to rival New York’s into a full-fledged online literary arts journal that boasts fantastic content and an impressive list of editors and contributors.
Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading Electric Literature made a huge splash in the literary world upon its inception, fashioning itself as the literary journal for the Internet era.
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Book Riot The site’s tag — “All Books. Never Boring” — is an apt summation of this sometimes quirky website that tries to make talking about books fun, and a little more inclusive to non-snobs than most outlets that discuss literature.
The Rumpus The best of the West, The Rumpus has a slew of great writers both editing and contributing to a site that churns out more than its fair share of great content on a daily basis. Plus, they’ll always be the site where many readers first encountered Cheryl Strayed in her advice-giving guise as Dear Sugar.
The New Inquiry In the grand tradition of great journals from The Partisan Review to n+1, The New Inquiry has made itself part of the bigger conversation by mixing political discussion, pop culture dissection, and a good dose of literary sensibilities.
3:AM Magazine Another great site that has been going strong for over a decade, 3:AM publishes everything from original flash fiction to criticism, and might be the best place on the net to read about modernist and postmodernist literature in the same place.
Granta You do know that one of the most important literary magazine in the entire English language also posts a whole lot of great content on its website, right? Did you read the Teju Cole piece they posted recently? Seriously, put this in whatever new reader you’re buying, and never miss a copy of this publication.
Largehearted Boy David Gutowski’s site is a source for daily book and music news, but the real draw is the wonderful Book Notes series, where authors discuss the music that played in the background as they wrote their books.
Issue The American Reader
HTML Giant “The internet literature magazine blog of the future” is really the site where you never know what you’re going to get, from weird and random lists to intelligent critiques of big novels and small alt-lit c hapbooks alike.
The Bat Segundo Ed Champion’s terrific podcast has featured plenty of luminaries, including John Updike, Martin Amis, Claire Messud, and National Book Award winners like Jesmyn Ward, but still has time for promising up-and-comers like Matt Bell. Always interesting, and easily one of the best literary podcasts.
Full Stop A site that puts up a handful of great reviews, as well as breaks stories like the one about the time Jonathan Franzen tried to scam some videos for a college library.
Founded by young literary stars Uzoamaka Maduka and Jac Mullen, The American Reader is a monthly print journal with a website that publishes fiction, poetry, criticism, and more — along with fascinating daily reprints of letters between literati.
Other People Brad Listi has carved out a nice little space for himself on the literary Internet, interviewing everybody from Sam Lipsyte, Jami Attenberg, and George Saunders to Tayari Jones and Michelle Orange. If you have a book out, you sorta have to go on vOther People.
Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable Like one of the Smithsonian’s great blogs, except way weirder, the online outpost of Lapham’s Quarterly publishes essays on weird historical subjects you’ve probably never heard of but will nonetheless find fascinating.
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McSweeny’s Internet Tendency All the quirky fun of the McSweeney’s world boiled down into one website. I still think “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfucker” should have won the Nobel, or at the very least, a Pulitzer. You also can’t go wrong with Teddy Wayne’s column of unpopular proverbs.
Literary Kicks Levi Asher doesn’t update his site as regularly as we’d like, but in between the few posts a week he does put up, take some time to go through his archive of entries that date back to 1994.
The Bookrageous Podcast Judging by the title, it should come as no surprise that this podcast is a celebration of books namely, the books read by the hosts, who each talk about their chosen titles for a few minutes. Need a reading suggestion? This is the best podcast to help you with that.
Hilobrow A hodgepodge of good reads, from pieces on zine collections to serializations of long-forgotten literature, HiLobrow is full of delightful daily surprises.
The Public Domain Review This not-for-profit finds unusual and interesting out-of-print works that are a mix of intriguing collections, as well as essays on topics like the writings of Isaac D’Israeli: “a scholar, man of letters and father of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.”
Guernica “A Magazine of Art & Politics” that doesn’t mess around with great literature, whether it’s interviewing James Salter, posting original fiction, or adding to a great poetry section.
“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
BORIS PASTERNAK