Not having read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is an oversight that it took me years to address. It’s probably strange that this wasn’t the first Kafka work I’d read… I think most people read The Metamorphosis first and then move on to other tales or to Kafka’s novels. Yet what I’d heard about The Trial was much more compelling to me in the past, and I read that book last year. It wasn’t until this morning that I decided to pick up the beaten old copy of The Metamorphosis that I’d picked up a few weeks ago at the Foreign Book …

The New Yorker ran this article on Edmund Gosse, John Churton Collins, and a very bad book review. There’s a moral to the story, so read to the end.

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century about fifteen minutes ago. This book was quite surprising, for Verne is now much more well-known for his adventure stories, like Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, there is a reason that this book remained unknown until the 1990s… his publisher, Hetzel, ironically rejected it as being too unbelievable. Far too unbelieveable to us is this verdict, for in Verne’s Paris of 1961, we see Paris with a working Metro, with electric lights and tap water everywhere, gas automotives and spun-metal …

Here’s the BBC news report on the death of Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said.

In the current issue of The Vocabula Review has a great article Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in from the Cold by Jjoan Ttaber Altieri. Grammar, gender, power, class, language mavens, and the third person singular genderless pronouns. It’s actually worth reading, whatever you think. I found this among many other great articles on the current Arts & Letters Daily.

Don’t write “rap poems”. If that’s what the job requires, for goodness sakes turn it down. (Or, at least do a better bloody job of it.) By the way, I side with many of the commenters: it’s embarrassing, and I think it says something about the monarchy that this is what is offered and accepted.