Many people already love their books as they would pieces of art – why else would we so proudly display books we will never read again on our bookshelves in our tiny New York apartments instead of boxing them away? We tell ourselves it’s in case we ever want to lend them or reference a passage or reread them, but it’s really because we love them as objets d’art, and want to look at them all day long. To that end, Jennie Ottinger creates hollowed-out, redesigned and painted-over versions of classic novels, replacing their guts with pithy summaries she gleans from SparkNotes. Ottinger’s idea is that in our busy, harried world, we don’t really have time to take in all the cultural input we would like to/are supposed to. We’re tempted to be horrified by this brusque treatment of literature, but we kind of love these faux-books. Ottinger just closed a show at Johansson Projects in Oakland, but a few of her pieces are on display in NYC until February 26 in the book-themed exhibition “Ex Libris” at the Adam Baumgold Gallery. Click through for more images of her work.
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One hundred years ago next week the great Russian master of fiction, Leo Tolstoy, passed away. In his honor The Atlantic has dug up a profile of the writer from 1891. For our part, we decided to look at the many faces (i.e. covers) of Anna Karenina, a novel that, when asked to name the three best novels ever, William Faulkner listed as one, two, and three. Originally the story was published in serial installments in The Russian Messenger from 1873 to 1877. The first time it appeared as a full book was 1878, with numerous reprintings since then. Click through for a gallery of its covers through the years.
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The Millions recently posted the very Shteyngart-y opening passage of Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel, Super Sad True Love Story
.
“Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off.”
It got us thinking about our own favorite beginnings, both recent and classic. Below are some favorites from our bookshelf. Feel free to add your own picks in the comments section.
1. Slumberland
by Paul Beatty
Best commentary on “post-blackness” considering Obama wasn’t even president when the book was written:
“You would think they’d be used to me by now. I mean don’t they know that after fourteen hundred years the charade of blackness is over? That we blacks, the once eternally hip, the people who were as right now as Greenwich Mean Time, are, as of today, as yesterday as stone tools, the velocipede, and the paper straw all rolled into one? The Negro is now officially human. Everyone, even the British, says so.”
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Ginger Tolstoy makes us giggle; that probably means we’re huge nerds. He also makes us hungry. So it goes. [Via The Book Bench via Woolylogic's Flickr]
