paper trail

Jul 9, 2013 @ 12:27:00 am

Christian Marclay's "The Clock"

The Guardian has attempted to create a literary version of Christian Marclay’s incredible artwork "The Clock." Marclay’s artwork consists of film clips featuring shots of clocks that are spliced into a 24-hour chronological loop and synched to real time, and the Guardian’s literary clock will do the same thing with text. For example, they’re looking for sentences like this one from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: “'It was 12:56 A.M. when Gerald drove up onto the grass and pulled the limousine right next to the cemetery.” They’re still accepting submissions of quotes, but hurry—the project is scheduled to debut at the Edinburgh international books fair on August 8.

Harvard University Press has bumped up the release of Ben Urwand's The Collaboration—a book about Hollywood’s collaboration with the Nazis—after a New York Times piece described the book as "creating a stir" among historians.

Over the past few months, New York Magazine book critic Kathryn Schulz has shared her distaste for The Great Gatsby, Christian Lorentzen has gone after Alice Munro in the London Review of Books, and Joseph Epstein has wondered in the Atlantic whether Kafka was overrated. At Salon, Laura Miller goes through the history of great literary takedowns.

The Paris Review’s Ted Scheinman reports from the University of North Carolina’s first annual Jane Austen summer camp—a week-long academic program pegged to the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice.

This is what Star Wars might have been like if it had been written by Shakespeare.