from From the Nets

This week's catch from the deep:

  •  The New York Times on the mini-controversy regarding Peter Matthiessen's nomination for a National Book Award for Shadow Country.

  •  Joy Williams interviewed in Bookslut by the inimitable Tao Lin.

  •  President-elect Barack Obama with KWLS 2003 keynote speaker Derek Walcott's Collected Poems in hand. Also, Walcott's newest: "Forty Acres," a poem for Barack Obama. (Thanks, Valparaiso / One Poet's Notes.)

  •  KWLS perennial and formeer U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins assesses Bob Dylan's poetry. (Thanks again, Valparaiso / One Poet's Notes.)

  •  Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning, previewed in our May interview, is now available to order.

A two-weeks' catch from around the web:

• The Nation reviews Gore Vidal's Selected Essays

• Interview with Samantha Hunt in Small Spiral Notebook

• Judy Blume in Jacket Copy on YA for Obama

• Critical Mass takes another look at James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

• Ernest Hemingway's Cuban baseball team

• Key West History Magazine online

• Valerie Martin's favorite books, in The Week

• Marilynne Robinson on Bat Segundo

• A directory of the Monroe County Public Library's online historical projects

• The double-rigged shrimp trawler pictured above is from NOAA's Fisheries Collection

Photo by Jose Cort; from NOAA's Fisheries Collection.

This week's catch from around the web:

• The Paris Review interview with Marilynne Robinson:

• Robinson's new novel, Home, reviewed by A.O. Scott in The New York Times: "a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature."

• Their father was a spy, after all: Robert and Michael Meeropol discuss the latest evidence in the 55-year old case against their executed parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

• Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore's novel Blindspot makes the Fall 2008 Editors' Picks list in Library Journal and receives a starred review.

• Junot Díaz's lecture at our 2008 Seminar was a brilliant and unexpectable investigation of the dangers inherent in authorial voice. They're still talking about it in the Silicon Valley, too.

• Robert Stone reviews Dexter Filkins's The Forever War

Photo by Arthur Rothstein, 1915

Fresh catch from around the web

• Julia Child was a spy. George Orwell has a blog. The notebooks of Thomas Jefferson record the dates on which his flowers bloomed. All this and maps, maps, and more maps on the blog of the American Historical Association.

• 2009 speaker Allan Gurganus takes on Thomas Eakins's portrait of Walt Whitman in an essay for The American Scholar.

• 2009 speaker Francisco Goldman wins the inaugural WOLA-Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

• Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York chronicles the two essential moments of Babar's creation: when Jean de Brunhoff and, years later, his son Laurent, set down their initial thoughts on paper.

• The flickr page of the Monroe County Public Library incudes newly added tracings of Key West gingerbread, and a fascinating collection of nearly 600 military passes issued to civilian workers in Key West during WWI.

Today's catch from around the web:

•2008 Seminar speakers Junot Díaz and Meghan O'Rourke back together for a video interview on SlateV

•Junot Díaz on the Colbert Report

•Ruth Greenglass, a key witness in the 1950s treason case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is dead, court papers reveal. Her testimony led to the execution of her sister-in-law, Ethel Rosenberg, which orphaned the Rosenberg's young sons. One of these sons, Michael Meeropol, joins us this January with daughter Ivy.

•Geraldine Brooks wins the Australian Book of the Year award and the Literary Fiction Book of the Year award for her recent People of the Book. Brooks will be a keynote speaker at our 2009 Seminar. You can read her interview with Littoral here.

Today's catch from around the Web:

•  This whole internet thing was basically invented by Paul Otlet in 1934.

•  '09 moderator, and recent Littoral interviewee, Alan Cheuse releases his latest Summer Reading List for NPR.org. Among others, he's recommending Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen and The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt, both of whom will join us for '09. He also recommends Language for a New Century, a poetry anthology co-edited by Tina Chang ('08).

•  Gore Vidal continues to "promote" his new book by exhibiting bad manners. At least he's honest. At the conclusion of this New York Times interview, Deborah Solomon offers a platitudinous "Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you." Gore: "I doubt that."

•  Mile Markers is a collaborative digital project involving the Monroe County Public Library, Florida International University, and the Historic Florida Keys Foundation. Use it to search for excellent-quality images from local collections (including that of the angling couple pictured here) and also a treasure-trove of oral histories recorded in the 1970s by the Key West Women's Club and by Dr. Virginia Irving for the Monroe County School Board.

•  Now that everyone knows about it, this whole internet thing is replacing our brains.

This week's catch from around the web:

2009 KWLS panelist Gore Vidal talks to Melvyn Bragg of the UK Times Online about the ongoing, going, going Democratic primary season. Of Hillary Clinton's endgame, Vidal says: "I think her strategy is more or less insane."

Samantha Hunt, '09 panelist and author of a new novel about inventor Nikola Tesla, talks with Bloomberg.com about Tesla's eccentricities. For instance, "He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours."

And, from the online Wall Street Journal back in February-- Barbara Chai published interviews from our 2008 Seminar with panelist Junot Díaz, keynote speaker Lee Smith, and program chair Robert Richardson. There's also a collection of several short conversations with '08 speakers Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Jake Silverstein, and Silas House.