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Complexity and Contradiction; Reading Audiobooks
I am an architecture student who is allergic to The Fountainhead. Can you recommend some books to counter with when well-meaning people, upon hearing that I’m studying architecture, ask whether I like...
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Book Perfume, Newspaper Dresses
Perfumes that smell like books? Depends on the book, really! Prom dresses made of newspapers? Depends on the broadsheet, really! An MRI with John Jeremiah Sullivan. A study finds that literature...
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Man Pulls Sword over Badly Treated Book: Happy Monday!
“Christopher Meusburger, twenty-nine, of St. Paul, Minnesota, allegedly threatened his sixty-two-year-old neighbor with a sword on Monday night after she complained that he mistreated a book she lent...
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When Art Got Expensive, and Other News
Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Juan de Pareja (detail), 1650. Finally available, after forty-one years: Gravity’s Rainbow, the audiobook. It comprises thirty CDs and is performed by a superhumanly...
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In the Details
Milton’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Some books are made to be read aloud—or, at least, they take on different dimensions when they’re heard or performed. The texts that make for great...
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Casting the Runes
From Night of the Demon, a 1957 film loosely based on M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes.” I love being read to. I could pretend it’s because it takes my mind away when I have a migraine or because it...
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Sexy Santa, and Other News
Aurel Schmidt, Shiva (detail), 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery. Photo: Martin Parsekian Today in audiobooks: recordings of erotic novels are selling like love muffins. And why not? What...
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Arcadia
John Gielgud in Chimes at Midnight. This is weather for inspiration: for films and books and good listening. If you’re in New York, go see the new restoration of Orson Welles’s 1966 Chimes at Midnight....
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