Montaigne

Sometimes the classics seem awfully musty. Other times, they are as vital as the morning newspaper. In a review of a new biography, we revisit the world of Michel de Montaigne, which doesn't have even a hint of mustiness. 'Montaigne invented the personal essay, that unpredictable and strangely addictive literary form devoted, as Bakewell puts it, to "re-creating a sequence of sensations as they felt from the inside, following them from instant to instant." Montaigne constantly revised and expanded "Essays" throughout his life; it was never really finished. "I do not portray being," he wrote, "I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another ... but from day to day, from minute to minute." More...

A national digital library?

This seems like a great idea. Robert Darnton writes about it in The New York Review of Books. The bottom line? Knowledge is good, and the free access to knowledge is one of the foundations of our country. Sure, there's copyright, but there's also the need for ideas to spread to all who want them. 'Can we create a National Digital Library? ... Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.' More... (Via)

National Book Awards finalists announced.

Check it out on MediaBistro.

Joe Hill on Elmore Leonard

Amazon provides a guest review of Leonard's new novel Djibouti by fellow author Joe Hill. Hill provides ten reasons why Leonard rules; it's a paean to craft. Here's reason number 6: 'The sound. Leonard famously said that if his sentences sound like writing, he rewrites them, but don’t be fooled. These sentences jump to their own dirty, hothouse jazz rhythm. There isn’t a better stylist anywhere in American letters.' More...

Betting on the literary prizes

In England, they bet on who will win the big prizes, like the Nobel Prize for literature. For a number of reasons, there doesn't seem to be the same urge to put your money where your reading glasses are in the US. Still, the concept is fun. 'For an industry dwarfed by the money showered on other forms of entertainment like movies, television and videogames, betting adds an enjoyable bit of competition to the mix, and makes the conversation about books both more serious and less serious.' More... (Via)

Poe

On the Powells blog, Doug Brown goes into the past to look at a little Edgar Allan Poe. It's interesting what he finds back there. 'As part of my classics year project last year, I couldn't resist the opportunity to delve into some Poe. I had only ever read a couple of the stories, and of course "The Raven." I recommend the dive; most of the stories are only a few pages long and can be sipped in a short period. As would be expected, there are tales of the macabre, but more than that there are tales of psychology. Poe understood that the human mind imagining the supernatural is much scarier than the banality of actual supernatural events. What makes "The Tell-Tale Heart" such a great story is that the dead man's heart isn't actually beating; all we need is the murderer's conviction that he can hear it louder and louder.' More...

Philip Marlowe on the radio

The Internet Archive, which has a lot of really valuable material, now has old radio shows of Chandler's famous detective that were, in their day, quite popular. Check it out! (Via OpenCulture.com.)