Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter has organized a public marathon reading of War and Peace across more than thirty Russian cities this week: Readers include Vladimir Urin, director of the Bolshoi ballet, and the great Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda, who made Ashes and Diamonds.
Applications for the second annual Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, the grant honoring the acclaimed journalist who died on assignment in Uganda in 2014, are due February 16th.
The Al Jazeera America shutdown is coming earlier than expected: The website will cease being updated at the end of this month, but you can still find the work (and contact details) of an excellent group of reporters and editors at their portfolio site.
At Jezebel, Catherine Nichols muses on Adelle Waldman’s analysis of love in fiction written by men and women. Nichols goes on to write about the ways in which characters in Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë change and adapt to one another, but she starts with a rather irresistible quotation from Douglas Adams: “It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.”
Some political scientists have set up a database of women experts on various topics, for those spoilsports out there who don’t enjoy an all-male panel.
Tonight at BookCourt, Christopher Sorrentino will present his new novel, The Fugitives. And at the Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara will launch The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century—you can read an excerpt from it here.