Melville House Books

Arts & Culture

• W.H. Auden’s “lost” journal recovered, 75 years later

  One of three known journals written by W.H. Auden has been recovered nearly 75 years after it was written. This journal dates between August and November 1939. Auden died in… Read more »

• “Give” and 22 other words that haven’t changed since the last Ice Age

  Linguists generally believe that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years, but a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that… Read more »

• David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech video

  David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address begins: (If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while… Read more »

• Ten Nights On Long Island: The Great Gatsby’s early reviews

  In its first year, The Great Gatsby sold a disappointing 21,000 copies, less than half of the first year sales for This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and Dammed.… Read more »

• Pink unicorns and pastel bling: Maureen Johnson calls out gendered covers

  When author Maureen Johnson tweeted on Tuesday, “I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, ‘Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can… Read more »

• Arts Council England fights back at Maria Miller

  I reported last month on Culture Secretary Maria Miller’s troubling speech on making the arts economically viable. That day, she addressed the heads of the biggest arts organisations in Britain… Read more »

• New York taxi drivers read their poetry at PEN World Voices Festival

  It’s not surprising that cab drivers would meet a wide variety of saucy characters over the course of their careers, and overhear or participate in countless conversations with strangers that… Read more »

• Finally, a self-published bestseller worth reading: @Seinfeld2000′s The Apple Store

  It was once a truth universally acknowledged that 1. self-published books are generally pretty terrible* and 2. books adapted from Twitter accounts are entirely terrible, but all that changed when the person… Read more »

• Bourbon and beasts: Hunter S. Thompson & Ralph Steadman at The Kentucky Derby

  Kentucky Derby weekend (and the hangover that punctuates its end) marks the anniversary of the first collaboration between Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman. In “The Kentucky Derby is… Read more »

• Grendel was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, claims the world’s coolest literary critic

  The signal internet-driven joy of recent decades—other than the Hamster Dance (never forget)—is in discovering previously unsuspected veins of enthusiasm and rage into which some portion of humanity has been… Read more »