Top of page
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
The Bank of England announced last week that beginning in 2017 Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the 10-pound note. The Times asks the question: which American authors would you choose to grace the dollar bill? You might want to start with a perusal of the Library’s Books That Shaped America beforehand. Wouldn’t want …
Posted in: Collections, News and Events
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
The following is a guest post written by Jessica Edington, a summer intern at the Library of Congress. In my summer internship in the Library’s Humanities and Social Services Division I’ve worked with “old media,” or soon-to-be old media. One of my projects is helping sort and catalogue the pre-1998 software in the Machine Readable …
Posted in: Guest Posts
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
Last Saturday was Cormac McCarthy’s birthday, and BookRiot celebrated with “A Beginner’s Guide to Cormac McCarthy.” We don’t have all the YouTube videos, but the Library does have quite a stash on Mr. McCarthy. You can come listen to Cormac read from The Crossing or just follow the links to the sample text here for …
Posted in: Interviews, News and Events
Posted by: Rob Casper
The following is a guest post by staffer and blogger Caitlin Rizzo, who is on vacation this week. My family has a long history in Washington, D.C. My maternal grandmother and grandfather spent their early years as a family in Anacostia; my paternal grandfather was an Emmy-winning TV news editor for the local Fox 5 …
Posted in: News and Events
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
Salon has published a list of Six Most Influential Women Writers You’ve Never Heard Of. You may have a hard time tracking down these ladies in a books store (true to advertisement, I had never read any of their works), but a quick perusal through our catalog showed that they live on in our collections. …
Posted in: Uncategorized
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
According to the Smithsonian’s “Surprising Science” blog, a life of reading and writing can help you stave off mental decline as you age. This is fantastic news for us at the Poetry and Literature Center, or was until we read the part about reaching peak mental agility at 22. On the plus side, our non-peak …
Posted in: News and Events
Posted by: Rob Casper
For this 4th of July post, I would like to begin by saluting former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Since the beginning of June Billy has served as the summer host for Garrison Keillor’s daily radio feature The Writer’s Almanac. Billy’s project as Laureate, “Poetry 180,” was a huge success, and we still get calls and …
Posted in: Poets Laureate
Posted by: Caitlin Rizzo
Last Friday, Julio Cortazar’s groundbreaking novel Hopscotch turned 50. For a slightly late Monday morning celebration, Cortazar fans should head to the Los Angeles Review of Books to read Ted Gioia’s essay “How to Win at Hopscotch.” Of course, if you’ve only read Cortazar’s short story collection you received for Christmas two years ago, you …
Posted in: Collections, News and Events, Poets Laureate