AS THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC SWEPT THE WORLD, WE ASKED 29 AUTHORS TO WRITE NEW SHORT STORIES INSPIRED BY THE MOMENT. WE WERE INSPIRED BY GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO’S “THE DECAMERON,” WRITTEN AS THE PLAGUE RAVAGED FLORENCE IN THE 14TH CENTURY. 
Category Archives: Literature
Podcasts: “Drawing An Albatross With A Camera Lucida” By Gaby Wood (LRB)
Gaby Wood reads her diary from the latest issue of the LRB, in which she tries to draw an albatross using a camera lucida.
By the time I used the camera lucida in the museum, I’d spent several months grappling with the strange proposition offered by its prism. I’d read that the image was sharper if you held it over a dark drawing surface, but that didn’t make any sense to me until the smoked metal etching plate was beneath my hand. Suddenly the albatross skeleton appeared on it: bright, spectral. The process was different from the way I’d imagined it. There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper. Without seeing what you were doing, you could feel it more keenly. It wasn’t like ice-skating at all.
A camera lucida is an optical device used as a drawing aid by artists. The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure.
New Art Books: “Vincent’s Books – Van Gogh And The Writers Who Inspired Him”
From Hyperallergic (June 13, 2020):
In his paintings we see books on their own, or books in the company of people or other objects; small, lonely ziggurats of books, or a book beside a candle. That last juxtaposition is telling in the extreme. Vincent had a reverence for books. They were sacred ground. They have a kind of inner glow about them.
He reverenced books for their intellectual and emotional content.
He read Dickens, Carlyle, Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola in the original. Dickens and Carlyle were never very easy to read, then or now, but this Dutchman did so. He even read English poetry – John Keats, for example.
About the Author
Mariella Guzzoni is an independent scholar and translator living in Bergamo. She has been collecting editions of the books that Vincent van Gogh read and loved for many years, and curated the exhibition ‘Van Gogh’s Passion for Books’ at the Sormani Library, Milan, in 2015.
Literary Profiles: The “Sparkling, Perfect” Prose Of P.G. Wodehouse (BBC)
From BBC Culture (June 2, 2020):
With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries.
If we’re talking about culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works of PG Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making people happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition. The other reason is that he was better at it than any other writer in history.
P. G. Wodehouse: A Brief History
The author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and Mr Mulliner, P. G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 and educated at Dulwich College. After two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank he became a full-time writer, contributing to a variety of periodicals including Punch and the Globe. He married in 1914.
As well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and at one time had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. His time in Hollywood also provided much source material for fiction.
At the age of ninty-three, in the New Year’s Honours List of 1975, he received a long-overdue knighthood, only to die on St Valentine’s Day some forty-five days later.
Interviews: Author Peter Boxall On His Book “The Prosthetic Imagination”
Literature: “Shakespeare And Company” Digitizes Reading Library Of Joyce, Hemingway & De Beauvoir
Gertrude Stein. James Joyce. Ernest Hemingway. Aimé Césaire. Simone de Beauvoir. Jacques Lacan. Walter Benjamin.
What do these writers have in common? They were all members of the Shakespeare and Company lending library.
In 1919, an American woman named Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop and lending library in Paris. Almost immediately, it became the home away from home for a community of expatriate writers and artists now known as the Lost Generation. In 1922, she published James Joyce’s Ulysses under the Shakespeare and Company imprint, a feat that made her—and her bookshop and lending library—famous around the world. In the 1930s, she increasingly catered to French intellectuals, supplying English-language publications from the recently rediscovered Moby Dick to the latest issues of The New Yorker. In 1941, she preemptively closed Shakespeare and Company after refusing to sell her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer.
The Shakespeare and Company Project uses sources from the Beach Papers at Princeton University to reveal what the lending library members read and where they lived. The Project is a work-in-progress, but you can begin to explore now. Search and browse the lending library members and books. Read about joining the lending library. Download a preliminary export of Project data. In the coming months, check back for new features and essays.
Literary Arts: New Website Archives Work Of British Illustrator And Designer Peter Campbell (1937-2011)
The website is about the work of the designer, writer and illustrator Peter Campbell (1937‑2011). The intention is to present an archive of Peter’s illustration, design and editorial work, as well as occasional selections from his writing.
When asked what he did for a living, Peter would usually say he was a designer, or, a typographer. Designing for print – books, exhibition catalogues, magazines, posters – 
took up the most substantial part of his time, at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s and thereafter as a freelance. He was also an illustrator, a journalist, an author of children’s books, an editor and a publisher. The great range of his professional work, and his encompassing interest in the work of others, made him a collaborator sought out by writers, publishers and artists.
Diana Souhami, who worked with Peter often, wrote in the Guardian after his death: “He had the ability to conceptualise what each publishing project needed and to get it right. He was hugely and diversely productive, but seldom hit a wrong note.”
Discussing his journalism in her appreciation in the London Review, Mary‑Kay Wilmers wrote: “There are people whom getting a grip doesn’t suit, who don’t want to be confined. One can honour the world in depth or across a wide range and there were few aspects of the world that Peter didn’t wish to honour.”
He probably would have been delighted by – and certainly modestly sceptical of – Alan Bennett’s appraisal, in the posthumous publication of a catalogue of his pictures in Artwork, that he was “an heir to Ardizzone, Bawden and Ravilious.”
Peter Campbell was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1937. In 1960 he emigrated to London where he lived for the rest of his life. He died in 2011.
Top Digital Magazines: “The Brooklyn Rail – May 2020” – Arts & Culture
AUDREY FLACK with Charles Duncan
“When you’re alone in the studio, and your life is turned upside down by something, it’s you and the work.”
Art In Conversation
HENRI LOYRETTE with Joachim Pissaro
Literary Podcasts: “WHY THE DECAMERON IS GREAT QUARANTINE READING”
The latest episode of the Octavian Report – Rostrum coronavirus crisis podcast features Wayne Rebhorn. The latest episode of our coronavirus crisis podcast features Wayne Rebhorn of the University of Texas at Austin. Wayne is the author of an acclaimed translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, perhaps the paradigmatic work of pandemic literature.
The Decameron is set among a group of witty, earthy social isolators who have fled the plague ravaging Florence. We spoke with Wayne about Boccaccio and his most famous work, the conditions that helped birth it, and what we can learn from them in our current situation.
Interviews: “Shakespeare In A Divided America” Author James Shapiro
In a year of plagues, power struggles and star-crossed lovers divided by lockdown, Anne McElvoy asks James Shapiro, author of “Shakespeare in a Divided America”, what the bard would make of it all. Shakespeare is claimed by Americans of all political stripes.
But how can a lad from 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon illuminate the past and future of the republic now? Plus, what the president might teach the professor about Shakespeare’s work. And, Shapiro prescribes a verse for the trials and tribulations of 2020.
Boomers Daily 