Things you may not know about Ernest Hemingway: he had a son named Bumby, he taught Ezra Pound how to box, and at the end of his life, he “had shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic and believed the FBI was following him” (which was actually true). James Salter assesses Paul Hendrickson’s new biography of Papa in the New York Review of Books.
Astronomers in Texas have figured out the exact hour that Mary Shelley decided to write Frankenstein based on her description of the moonlight on Lake Geneva in June of 1816.
Courtesy of The Atlantic, a visual history of literary references on “The Simpsons.” (Lisa, unsurprisingly, is very well read).
John Lithgow’s memoir comes out on Tuesday.
Bloomberg crunches the numbers to see what it would take to save St. Mark’s Bookshop.
What kind of hobby is collecting signed books, Geoff Dyer wonders? “Autograph-hunting combined with biblio-fetishism? Name-dropping in the form of name-hoarding? A little of both, certainly, but I think there is something about the solitary, wholly internalized nature of reading that makes one crave an ex libris tattoo as external confirmation of the transient intimacy of reader and book.”
