paper trail

Aug 18, 2013 @ 2:41:00 pm

A shirt with the entire text of "Hamlet" printed on it.

Since publishing his first book of short stories three years ago, James Franco has released poetry collections and memoir. He has a novel coming out this fall. And he's been in various graduate programs and movies. So upon hearing the news that Franco is writing the foreword to a new Damion Searls translation of Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian, David Ulin at the Los Angeles Times says that it’s time for Franco to give it a rest. “Let’s be honest,” Ulin writes, "he’s in over his head.”

Flavorwire rounds up the most unreliable narrators in literature, from Humbert Humbert to Patrick Bateman to Nick Carraway.

Courtesy of McSweeney’s, an excerpt from the “Field Guide to Rare Punctuation”: “The Royal Ampersand, a species hunted to near-extinction for its characteristic twisted beak, is now only found in captivity. A regular point of discussion for sort-of-cute graduate students, the Royal Ampersand prides itself on being an alternative form of its twin—with which it has a complicated and largely parasitic relationship—the word ‘and.’”

A company called Litographs is selling shirts that feature designs made out of the entire printed text of a book in the public domain.

The Paris Review’s Sadie Stein sits in on a class on literary architecture at Columbia, “a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts.” Artist Matteo Pericoli tells Stein: “‘One student chose ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again’ and thought she would just make a ship,’ he explains, referring to David Foster Wallace’s cruise-ship odyssey. But then they learned the class’s mantra: ‘Literary, not literal.’”

And speaking of the overlap between art and literature, the New Republic highlights eleven works of art made out of books.