If the phrases “d’you think,” “panting slightly,” and “strode back” all appear in a novel by an author you’ve never heard of, there’s a chance J.K. Rowling wrote the book. At Yahoo, Chris Wilson locates the “15 stylistic fingerprints that link The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith to four novels by J. K. Rowling.”
During a meeting with his lawyer in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on Wednesday, Edward Snowden was given a change of clothes and some reading material. In additional to several shirts and a new pair of jeans, Antatoly Kucherena brought Snowden a copy of Crime and Punishment. Kucherena has previously said he thought the book was relevant to Snowden’s situation, and that “it would be pleasant for him to read about just who is Raskolnikov.” “I don’t want to say that their internal conflicts are similar,” Kucherena remarked, “but all the same, I think it’s a world classic and it will be interesting for him.”
Little, Brown is getting set to republish seven books by former Paris Review editor George Plimpton. The books slated to come out in 2015 are Paper Lion, Out of My League, The Bogey Man, Mad Ducks and Bears, Shadow Box, Open Net, and One for the Record.
A New Yorker reader sends Sasha Frere-Jones (or Sasha Freire-Jones, as she calls him) a “concept-driven letter of complaint” that takes issue with the magazine’s excessive use of commas.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is preparing to publish a memoir titled My Brief History (a play on his scientific opus, A Brief History of Time) about his life and work. In addition to touching on Hawking’s “two marriages and his pioneering work in the field of quantum cosmology,” the book will span “Hawking's early life in London and St Albans, his student years in Oxford and Cambridge, and the onset of motor-neurone disease shortly after his 21st birthday.”
The Bank of England has decided to put Jane Austen’s face on one side of the redesigned £10 note. On the other side of the bill, they’re going to print an Austen quote, but rather than go with one of the author's quips about class or money, the Bank is using this line from Pride and Prejudice: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!"
