Without a doubt, you’re reading this from a screen, and probably the only thing you’re smelling is your morning coffee. But now chemists have quantified and explained that long-coveted “old book smell,” for better or worse… Some old books, like 19th-century French writer Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame, are bound in human skin (ew). Good news if you’d prefer to stick to the scanned: HathiTrust, the scannable digital library, has won the court case permitting the agency to continue uploading books for those who cannot read them in person.
Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has scored the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Sound of Things Falling (translated by Anne McLean, who snagged 25 percent of the award’s cash prize!). The newest United States Poet Laureate has been announced: Charles Wright, Pulitzer Prize winner and translator of Italian writer Eugenio Montale, will preside over the country’s most eminent poetic spot.
At The Millions, a piece about Indian writer Kiran Nagarkar on language, aging, and the persistence of his novel, Cuckold (despite disappointing sales). And Syrian writer Adonis has reinterpreted pre-Islamic Arabian poet Zuhayr.
This week in international sensations: the FIFA World Cup is the globe’s most-watched sporting event, and its joueurs inspire meditations on beauty (and boredom). At the New Republic, eleven writers and intellectuals, including Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, American Geoff Dyer, and British Futebol expert Alex Bellos on their favorite soccer/football players. (On the subject of Knausgaard: here’s an essay on his rather predictable discomfort with the celebrity he’s enjoying). She can’t fly, but she can sing: in Italy, Roman Catholic Sister Cristina Scuccia has won the country’s version of the international singing competition The Voice. And all good things come to an end: @everyword, the Twitter bot that has been diligently tweeting every word in the English language since 2007, has reached its end.
Asymptote polyglots, consider your egos stroked: evidence suggesting that learning a second (or third, or fourth) language slows the brain’s inevitable demise mounts once again. Not that you needed convincing.