Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 43

ET IN ARCADIA ...

It's hard to think of a place we'd rather be this wekeend than in Washington, D.C., enjoying the Folger revival of Tom Stoppard's masterpiece, Arcadia.

So what you're served on this evening is a lavishly overflowing platter of the playwright's talents for finding connectivity in, well, everything: Newtonian physics, Byronic poetry, academic charlatanism, the designs of English gardens, the sexual awakening of a teenage girl, Fermat's theorems. Whether you know a single thing about Pierre de Ferma

GIVEAWAY HOLIDAY

We're taking a one-time holiday from our Friday giveaway - we've still got to select winners from our last two outings - but it will be back next week.  We're also revising the transcription of our big Joseph O'Neill interview for a four-day posting plus giveaway, and we've got one or two other multi-day surprises in development, so do pop back next week.  Until then, a fine weekend to all.

NPR'S TOP 100

NPR's Dick Meyer has posted his list of the best 100 novels in English, and he's inviting your "comments, counterlists, other lists and mockery."

I am not a learned or prolific reader of novels. My taste is probably medium-brow, male and parochial in many ways. Tough. It's my list. I included two books that probably aren't novels: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Fabulous Small Jews. Lots of innovative, modern stuff didn't make it because I am not good at reading it.

HAY GETS WIRED

Sony has become the first consumer electronics sponsor of the Guardian Hay Festival.

A panel discussion hosted by Sony entitled "Brave New World—Rights and Wrongs in the Digital Future" will take place on 29th May as part of the collaboration. The debate will focus on the power and management of online content and digital reading devices.

HARRY RENT'S IPOD

How do you know you've really arrived?

When Largehearted Boy runs your playlist in Book Notes.  Here's how it starts:

The protagonists of first novels are commonly assumed to be stand-ins for their authors. And for good reason – they commonly are. However, in the case of my character, Harry Rent, this is most emphatically not the case. His unhappy marriage ends in the death of his wife. My marriage is happy, my wife thankfully breathing as I type this. Harry is digressive and indecisive. I’m, well

BANVILLE ON BECKETT

Anyone who has ever heard Banville on Beckett will understand why the most important thing you have to do this morning is go over to The New Republic to read "The Word-Stormer."

In his lifetime he wrote some fifteen thousand letters--at least that is the number his relentlessly zealous editors have managed to track down and make their selection from--most of them by hand, to a wide circle of correspondents. If all this concentric circling smacks a little of Dante, then it is apt, for Beckett had

BEA PLANS

I've been getting a number of emails about BEA, so it seemed most efficient to say here that I will actually not be attending BEA this year.  It's the first time I'm missing it since launching TEV in 2003 but I have some personal business to attend to here in L.A.  But I welcome stringer reports from anyone who cares to send on dispatches ...

A WORTHY CAUSE

Guys Lit Wire, a site devoted to getting teenage boys to read more, has moved into its second phase - a book fair, coordinated with Powells, to get books into the hands of incarcerated boys in the LA County Juvenile Justice System.  You can read more about the effort - and help out - here.

(You can read about my own experience with LA's at-risk youth here.)

BOHZE MOI ...

Russia continues to display its firm grasp of artistic freedom, as a federal district court forces a journalist to pay a $1,000 fine for writing a negative book review.

The plaintiff, an author whose work of fiction was reviewed in the publication's book review section, sued the reviewer, claiming that the author and his family had experienced severe mental suffering and that his professional reputation was damaged as a result of the review. The writer stated that after reading the book review, h

"I WANT TO STAY ON STAFF AND DO WHAT I WANT"

Dan Baum's entertaning tweets on being hired (and fired) by The New Yorker gives us our first reason to pay attention to Twitter.

(For the record, to those who have written and invited, we do have accounts on both Twitter and Facebook, but they exist merely to thwart squatters and impersonators.  We have, as of this writing, no intention of using them.