Hell Mouth at Earbox

 

The composer John Adams, who proved himself a deft writer in his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, published last year and out in paperback in a couple of weeks, has found a new home for his prose in the Hellmouth blog at his site, earbox.com. Mozart, Frank Zappa, and Proust turn up, and Theodore Adorno meets Sean Hannity. And we learn that Adams is delivering this year's Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale.

 

See John Adams's blog here.

 

Read our interview with Adams on Hallelujah Junction here.

 

 

 

February 10: The Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke at the British Navy's expense, occurred on this day in 1910. Among the young Bloomsbury conspirators was Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and, though she played only a minor…

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Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

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Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.