“These spare pages please and engage the eye, heart, and mind, like leaves in a chapbook. Liliane’s Balcony is a small elegant book in every way. Readers will be inspired to visit Fallingwater and listen for Liliane’s voice above the falls.”
“These spare pages please and engage the eye, heart, and mind, like leaves in a chapbook. Liliane’s Balcony is a small elegant book in every way. Readers will be inspired to visit Fallingwater and listen for Liliane’s voice above the falls.”
Fritz Swanson has graciously donated time, talent and materials to create a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind edition of Charles Baxter’s poem “Please Marry Me” for The Great Write Off and The State of the Book. The top five FWR fundraisers for The Great Write Off will get one of only 100 copies of the poem handmade with care by Fritz.
Here at the FWR blog, we have a thing for books: as furniture, as clothing, even in the bathroom. But this might just take the proverbial cake: a bathtub made of books. Neatorama pointed me to the above amazing art project/feat of book-engineering by artist Vanessa Mancini, at Who Cares About That?: This bath is made entirely out of books which Vanessa cut and fitted together over a metal frame to form a bath of books, which is suspended by four antique bath tub, lion-shaped feet. She intends to later cover it in layers of resin and has already applied […]
1983. Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. A horrific incident that haunts the Kenney siblings for decades to come. Jennifer Taylor calls Carol Anshaw’s new novel, Carry the One, a “compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.”
Like most readers, you probably have your own mental image of Humbert Humbert, or Emma Bovary, or the Misfit. But if you’re the kind of person who likes a visual, check out The Composites, a Tumblr site that plugs literary descriptions of characters into police composite sketch software. The results are… well, take a look below and decide for yourself. Here’s how the police sketch program portrayed the three characters I mentioned above, along with the passages that generated them. (All images via The Composites.) Humbert Humbert, from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous […]
Okay, let me walk you through this one. The Thing Quarterly is a “periodical in the form of an object.” Says its site: Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service. The most recent issue (Issue 16) is a work by Dave Eggers in the form of a shower curtain. The […]
Joseph Herscher reads—but his Rube-Goldberg-esque machine does all the heavy lifting. The New York Times has a schematic–but the video is much more fun: Further Reading Watching: Books cavort in a bookshop in “The Joy of Books“ Busby Berkeley meets bookshelf Book dominoes!
We hear a lot about how writers find their inspiration. But how about other creative artists? The Guardian surveyed contemporary musicians, dancers, directors, and architects to find out where they got their creative inspiration. Much of their advice is unexpected, yet would be useful to writers as well. Here’s a sampler: Guy Garvey, musician: Spending time in your own head is important. When I was a boy, I had to go to church every Sunday; the priest had an incomprehensible Irish accent, so I’d tune out for the whole hour, just spending time in my own thoughts. I still do […]
Today we have a simple but striking DIY gift idea: a picture frame made from a hardcover book. Maybe you’ve got an old book with unreadable pages but an intact cover, or maybe you found a gorgeous old hardcover at a used bookstore that could use a new lease on life (hello, Illustrated Cheeses of the World). Craft blog Papernstitch offers this tutorial on making that hardcover into a picture frame for a one-of-a-kind gift. The full tutorial is here (via)—you’re on your own for the book, though.
