Blinks: Read and Recommended

Joseph Epstein insightfully recounts his experiences with growing old, in an essay preceding his 90th birthday in January.

"Traditional book publishing with thousands of publishers worked pretty well from 1960 to 1995 and then it just fell apart.

courtesy of a friend:

As a child I loved the series of "Fractured Fairy Tales," animated shorts narrated by Edward Everett Horton, which appeared as part of The Bullwinkle and Rocky Show in the 1960s.

"No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting.

A few snippets: Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction.

I have been reading Joseph Epstein's essays (collected in many books) for over thirty years--not always with agreement, but always with interest and illumination.

I found the below by accident, bouncing around the web, but the sentiment is perfectly good.

A new interview with me, on "Excavating the Inklings and Little-Known Authors," is online at the Fellowship & Fairydust site, here.

There is a new two-hour documentary titled Quintessentially Irish (2024) in which the current Lord Dunsany appears about a dozen times, discussing several things from his great grandfather to his own experience of watching a marriage scene in Braveheart b…

I would substitute "literature" for "literary fiction" in the title of this short article by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings from Persuasion, but a lot of what it says about the state of publishing in the 21st century is spot on.

Sam Leith ruminates on the unsettled "rules" and sometimes ridiculous costs to quoting poetry in a work of nonfiction.

I recently learned that the Folio Society has published an illustrated centenary edition of The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany.

A few extracts from an interesting article by Christine Smallwood, on "A Reviewer's Life: The Material Constraints of Writing Criticism Today": Newspaper book reviews have been contracting for decades, and while magazines like The Nation and The Atlantic…

George R.R.

"If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging.

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

The Dublin Review of Books has an interesting article by Robin Wilkinson on Lord Dunsany, particularly covering The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933).

There is a new article up at The New Yorker, on "How Has Big Publishing Changed American Fiction" by Kevin Lozano.

A long and very interesting essay by Adam L.G.

Here's a publisher's advertisement from 1933.

"Our literary past is under assault.

I enjoyed this essay, "The Books That Made me" by Penelope Lively.

A year and a half ago, I noted the current Lord Dunsany, Randal Plunkett (the 21st Baron Dunsany), and his efforts at rewilding a portion of the Dunsany Estate.

This article by Joanne Harris is all too true.