Bookstores Reborn in Lexington and New Orleans: Three decades ago Lexington, Kent.’s beloved Morris Book Shop closed. This weekend, the store will celebrate its long awaited re-opening in a new 1,700 sq.-ft. location. [Publishers Weekly]
New Bout in Seinfeld Cookbook Battle: The suit charged that the Seinfelds were guilty of copyright infringement and defamation. (It was Mr. Seinfeld who, during an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman,” before calling Ms. Lapine a “wacko,” mockingly suggested that his wife was accused of “vegetable plagiarism.”) [NYT]
Why The Wind in the Willows still lifts children’s hearts: After 100 years, Kenneth Grahame’s masterwork still feels as current as it ever has. [Telegraph]
Iain Banks on how practising with SF led to The Wasp Factory: At the start of 1980 I thought of myself as a science fiction writer, albeit a profoundly unpublished one. I’d wanted to be a writer since primary school and had started trying to write novels when I was 14, finally producing something loosely fitting the definition two years later: a spy story crammed with sex and violence (I still scorn the idea of only writing what you know about). [Guardian]
‘The Leopard’ Turns 50: Sicily is the key to Italy, as Goethe once wrote, and one novel is the key to Sicily: “The Leopard,” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece. [NYT]
Book Of A Lifetime: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart: In choosing a book that has shaped and changed my life, I have dithered between classics, none of them contemporary and all of them novels. For me the significant book will always be a novel, although I do have a soft spot for The SAS Survival Guide, and particularly the section on camp craft. [Independent]
All in the mind: ‘Writers and psychiatrists have been up to very similar things in terms of the exploration of human dysfunction’, says Patrick McGrath. [Guardian]
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