Fear and Vanity
incline us to imagine
we have caused a face
to turn away which merely
happened to look somewhere else.
 
----  ----  ----
Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important 
Person at present."
The same remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."

from “Marginalia” by W.H. Auden, City Without Walls and Other Poems

Mencken: “[Paul] Fussell credits Mencken’s series of ‘elegantly subversive’ Prejudices volumes with making him a genuine reader and eventually a writer. He reveled in Mencken’s ‘refreshing battle against complacent inhumanity and the morons’ – like any know-it-all aspiring young literary man.”

Comedy: Monty Python is irreverent and sometimes blasphemous, but now one of its productions is being accused of a different kind of blasphemy. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot opined, and that seems especially true of the progressive political class and its commissars among the creative types.”

Fantasy: Patrik Leo raves over Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair among others. See the whole trilogy here.

Also, Elliot Brooks talks about a few new fantasy novels.

Non-fiction: Bookstore tales. Here’s a “charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who ‘launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.'”

Also, ten non-fiction recommendations from Kirkus Reviews.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.