Tuesday's Literary Briefing

Drew Crunches #s In A Wooden Box

While Andrew whittles wood (and crunches numbers) on his mid-fall sojourn to the North Carolina mountains, we dutifully pick up the slack. But that’s alright, it’s how we do. Literature waits for no man, as Charles Dickens might attest. Dickens, one of fiction’s most formidable and lasting connoisseurs, was a master craftsman and 19th century iconoclast. The Washington Post measures the achievement of his life’s work. In one of our favorite recent media juxtapositions, meat-hater Jonathan Safran Foer is chewed up and spit out by the Cattle Network. Looking outside Brooklyn’s leafy bubble, we tag along with the NY Review of Books to Iraq, where war is still raging and people are still dying. After that, we climb aboard our time machine, which brings us to the future — when eBooks rule and every person on Earth is an author — and to the past, when the year is 1989 and all Hell is about to break loose. Whittle that, Andrew. — Kevin Murphy

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