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The Guardian lists the United Kingdom's one hundred bestselling books of all time; Joan Didion is slotted to pen a film script for director Todd Field; Vogue features Annie Leibovitz photographs with Jonathan Safran Foer, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Junot Díaz in period costume at Edith Wharton's estate; and other news.
A self-confessed "nerd about fonts" imagines what the voices of some of the most popular fonts would sound like.
Author David Rakoff has passed away at forty-seven; Forbes lists the top-earning authors; Charles Simic laments the lost art of writing postcards; and other news.
In a short video from earlier this year, the author of three essay collections, including his most recent, Half Empty (Doubleday, 2010), and a frequent contributor to This American Life, talks about why he writes, the nature of creativity, and why writing only gets harder. Rakoff died on Thursday night after a battle with cancer. He was forty-seven.
The author of the new story collection Sorry Please Thank You (Pantheon), who is profiled in the current issue of the magazine by contributing editor Kevin Nance, talks about "not writing" as a means to being more productive, counterfeit writing, and writing that "slips out like a burp."
Julie Bosman has more on the scandal at Oxford American magazine; If you'd like to act in James Franco's film adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, go to Mississippi; a screen adaptation of a story by humorist David Sedaris is in the works; and other news.
The letter is one of the earliest and most widely practiced forms of the personal essay: It tells a story about the author's life; it poses questions; and, perhaps most important, it's a way of connecting to a reader. Write a letter to someone you know, keeping the basic tenants of the personal essay in mind. The letter should be about you, but should also somehow address a larger question or idea. For inspiration, check out Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road (Grossman, 1970), a collection of letters that documents her years-long correspondence and relationship with the owners of Marks & Co., a bookstore in London.
Inspired by the poem "An Anna Blume," written in 1919 by German artist Kurt Schwitters, this short film by Vessela Dantcheva explores the ways in which "lust and ingestion, disguised in love, drive the two characters to an end where love turns to be a very lonesome and strange place."
Novelist John Banville will revive Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character for a book coming out from Holt next year; poet CAConrad intends to open the Philadelphia Poetry Hotel, which will provide housing to low-income poets; the Guardian created a graphic of death scenes in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe; and other news.
A film is in the works about the relationship between author Norman Mailer and convicted felon Jack Abbott; filmmaker Lena Dunham secured the help of Mad Men star Jon Hamm to promote the New Yorker iPhone app; Mat Honan explains how security flaws at Apple and Amazon allowed his digital life to be destroyed; and other news.
