Tag: Literature
Christopher Hitchens and United Airlines’ Million-Miler Club
by Jim Benning | 08.04.10 | 12:26 PM ET
Christopher Hitchens’ touching piece about his battle with cancer in the latest Vanity Fair notes that he learned of the cancer after he reached a couple of milestones, including one on United Airlines:
Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Here’s hoping Hitchens is around to write more best-sellers—and to enjoy many years of those free United upgrades.
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Yahoo! BuzzJourney to Ithaca
by Jeffrey Tayler | 08.04.10 | 10:24 AM ET
iStockPhoto Jeffrey Tayler offers a lesson on life, travel and writing
Stieg Larsson Tourism Hits Sweden
by Eva Holland | 07.14.10 | 2:20 PM ET
The AP has a rundown of the key Stockholm sites from Larsson’s monster bestseller, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” We’ve written before about traveling the world through crime fiction—I suppose this closes the circle? (Via The Book Bench)
Newsweek Takes a Road Trip Through Pop Culture History
by Eva Holland | 07.07.10 | 2:25 PM ET
Travel-themed works featured in the slideshow run the gamut from “The Odyssey” to “Saved by the Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas.” A few of our favorite summer vacation movies and favorite fictional travelers make the grade. (Via @SophiaDembling)
‘Lots of People Buy Books in the Airport Every Day’
by Eva Holland | 07.06.10 | 1:41 PM ET
The Book Bench goes bookspotting at O’Hare, and comes back with a slideshow of travelers and their airport reads.
10 Wanderlust-Inducing Travel Novels and Story Collections
by Frank Bures | 06.29.10 | 3:11 PM ET
iStockPhoto Frank Bures on the books to read when you're seeking inspiration
Geist Magazine Announces Postcard Story Winners
by Eva Holland | 06.24.10 | 3:34 PM ET
Once again, Geist has announced the winners of their annual Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest, celebrating very short stories inspired by vintage postcards. I liked Honorable Mention We Are Electric, by Kellee Ngan, about a couple on a beach holiday. Here’s a taste:
We were supposed to be spotting wildlife for him to photograph. I pointed out pigeons and other everyday animals. He wielded his camera more like a telescope than a machine gun. He gazed through the lens but didn’t fire, didn’t try to catch the heron I spied mid-flight.
“It’s got to be something special,” he said.
I drew a line in the sand with my big toe. “You can erase what you don’t like.”
It’s Bloomsday. Do You Know Where Your Nearest ‘Ulysses’ Reading Is?
by Jim Benning | 06.16.10 | 10:50 AM ET
Happy Bloomsday, the day (June 16) that James Joyce immortalized in his epic novel, “Ulysses.”
If you have the evening free and are in the mood, this might be a good time to seek out a local “Ulysses” reading or related pub crawl. The L.A. Times offers up a short list of gatherings around the U.S. For more on the annual rite, check out this New York Times story.
And look at that: Even Twitter is lighting up with posts about Bloomsday.
World Cup Reads: Soccer in Africa and Beyond
by Eva Holland | 06.14.10 | 2:14 PM ET
The start of the World Cup has many of us thinking about great books on soccer. For that reason, we’ve dug up a feature we did a few years ago, Soccer: Three Great Books, which highlights a few of our favorites.
Beyond that, Flavorwire offers up a globally minded soccer reading list.
And on his site, World Hum contributor Frank Bures also shares his two-part list; the first covers soccer in England, Italy, Atlanta and beyond, while the second focuses on soccer in Africa.
(Flavorwire list via The Book Bench)
Charles Dickens: The First Great Travel Writer?
by Frank Bures | 05.25.10 | 11:18 AM ET
Frank Bures digs into the legendary author's travel writing and finds some surprises
Of Great Buildings and Tourist Tchotchkes
by Jim Benning | 05.21.10 | 1:11 PM ET
Edward Hollis’s relatively new book—The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Las Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories—is getting some good press. While a post in The New York Review of Books is worth a look, I most enjoyed coming across a 2009 review from the Guardian.
More Tocqueville: James Wood Weighs In
by Michael Yessis | 05.19.10 | 5:05 PM ET
In the New Yorker, Wood immerses himself in two new books about Alexis de Tocqueville and the enduring significance of the Frenchman’s American travels.
Unlike some other European visitors (Charles Dickens and Fanny Trollope, and, more recently, Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy come to mind), he reserves serious judgment for mortal American sins, not venial ones. His anguish and scorn are provoked not by tobacco-chewing or unreal dentistry but by slavery and the extermination of the Indians. He often teeters on the edge of disdain—as when he notes the poor calibre of American politicians, or the people’s “immense opinion of themselves”—only to find the hospitality of explanation more interesting than the solitude of dismissal. To most non-Americans, American patriotic self-regard can be hard to take (an entire country seemingly innocent of the idea that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel), but Tocqueville is interested in the rationality of American pride, which he sensibly locates in the success, against all odds, of the young democracy.
We noted earlier that Tocqueville might also have been a bad traveler.
Searching for Neal Cassady in San Miguel de Allende
by Peter Ferry | 05.06.10 | 10:48 AM ET
Novelist Peter Ferry hunts down the ghost of the beatnik legend who inspired Kerouac, Ginsberg and so many others
Anthony Bourdain, Who Are Your Literary Heroes?
by Jim Benning | 04.27.10 | 12:47 PM ET
“Graham Greene would be one,” the Travel Channel host tells the Chicago Tribune in a wide-ranging interview. “I’m a huge fan. There’s so many ... Malcolm Lowry, Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches, I read a lot. Just the perfect crime novel is a thing of beauty. There’s much to be learned from Elmore Leonard or George V. Higgins ... fantastic writers.” (Via Gadling)
‘10 Best Books About Being Stranded’
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.10 | 12:50 PM ET
The Observer squeezes out a post-ash cloud list of 10 vivid accounts of being marooned in literature. Among the picks: “Lord of the Flies,” “Life of Pi” and “Concrete Island.”
Maybe in the future we’ll add something to the list that started with this.
Theroux: ‘The Netherlands has Struck Me as the Most Robust Literary Culture in the World’
by Michael Yessis | 04.21.10 | 10:29 AM ET
Paul Theroux weighs in on the state of fiction in the age of eBooks—and touches on travel—in an interview in the Atlantic.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Bad Traveler?
by Eva Holland | 04.19.10 | 11:06 AM ET
A new book on Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous American travels is out. Slate’s Francois Furstenburg parses the new material and takes a second look at the trip that inspired Democracy in America. He writes:
“[W]e learn that Tocqueville would not have made a very good traveling companion. “Repose was contrary to his nature,” [his companion Gustave de] Beaumont later recalled. “The slightest loss of time was unpleasant to him. ... [H]e was always leaving before he arrived.”
Mapped: ‘Pygmalion,’ ‘Faust,’ ‘Oedipus’ and ‘Leviathan’
by Eva Holland | 03.24.10 | 4:29 PM ET
In a very cool map graphic, Lapham’s Quarterly tracks the four classics—in all their various incarnations—across the globe. (Via The Book Bench)
Not a Tourist
by Tom Swick | 03.22.10 | 12:06 PM ET
On the evolving role of the travel writer in the age of mass tourism and YouTube
Are New York and Chicago the Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of American Fiction?
by Eva Holland | 03.17.10 | 3:13 PM ET
Andrew Seal makes his case over at Blographia Literaria:
Sorry, Boston. Sorry, L.A. Sorry, D.C. Sorry, San Fran. Sorry, the South. You have your claims, no doubt, but they are as the claims of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, or Gogol. To be sure, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky do not account for the entirety of Russian literature, certainly do not exhaust all options, but they are irreplaceable, irreducible forces upon the landscape of the national literature, and so it is with New York and Chicago, Chicago and New York.
There’s plenty to chew on in the comments, too. (Via The Book Bench)