The digitization of the world’s great writers continues apace: Thanks to a new open-access website, thousands of manuscripts by Emily Dickinson will be available for the first time in a single place. The site will pool the holdings of Amherst, Harvard, the Boston Public Library, and five other institutions, and will include facsimiles of Dickinson’s handwritten poems, scraps of paper, used envelopes, and other materials. The New York Times notes that the creation of the Emily Dickinson Archive has also revived “decades-old tensions between Harvard and Amherst, which hold the two largest Dickinson collections.” If you want a preview of what will be included in the archive, check out our slideshow of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems.
The American Psycho movie came out thirteen years ago, but it wasn’t until last week that somebody finally noticed the typos in the infamous business card scene. When Patrick Bateman and the boys from mergers and acquisitions whip out their cards, their titles are all misspelled, omitting the ‘c’ in acquisitions.
What would have happened if Hitler had won the war, or if Alaska were established as a Jewish state? At the Guardian, DJ Taylor rounds up his favorite novels that operate in “the historical subjunctive.”
Courtney Love is writing a memoir, and the book will reportedly come out this December with William Morrow. And what’s in it, you ask? According to promo material: “Nothing is off limits, not her relationship with Billy Corgan and Trent Reznor, nor her engagement to Ed Norton, and for the first time her marriage to Kurt Cobain will be revealed as the tragic romance it really was.”
In an essay for Page Turner, Kenneth Goldsmith considers “the writer as meme machine,” looking at the theories of Canadian media scholar Darren Wershler, and the unexpectedly poetic works of people who don’t think of themselves as poets.
The New Yorker has published a new story by Haruki Murakami that riffs on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, beginning with the sentence, “He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” “Samsa in Love” is available to read online. In other New Yorker news, the magazine is no longer accepting interns.