Links & Reviews

- Next weekend's Newburyport Literary Festival, honoring John P. Marquand and featuring a wide range of authors (Gregory Maguire, Andre Dubus III, Wally Lamb, and many others), will be held next weekend. Schedule of Events. Preview in today's Globe.

- Tevi Troy has a piece in the WaPo today on presidential reading habits.

- In the TLS, Ruth Scurr presents a version of her forthcoming introduction to a selection from Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution, to be published later this month.

- Probably the most-circulated story this week was the news that the Library of Congress will be acquiring the entire public Twitter archive, though it seems just how this is going to be done has yet to be ironed out.

- Speaking of Twitter, the great Paul Collins is now tweeting, @TheLitDetective.

- The British Library has acquired the archive of artist/author Mervyn Peake.

- British press have been all over the story of an anonymous donation to Oxfam that netted £37,000 at auction - a rare, self-published 1882 account of a trip to Fiji, with photographs.

Reviews

- James Shapiro's Contested Will: reviews by Kevin O'Kelly in the Boston Globe; David Sexton in the Scotsman; Katherine Duncan-Jones in Literary Review.

- Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison: review by D.J. Taylor in the Times.

- Nick Bunker's Making Haste from Babylon: reviews by James MacConnachie in the Times; Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto in the TLS.

- Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: reviews by Dennis Drabelle in the WaPo; Sophie Gee in the NYTimes.

- Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America: review by Thomas Mallon in the NYTimes.

- Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville's Discovery of America: review by David Reynolds in the NYTimes.

- Ian Davidson's Voltaire: A Life: review by Susan Elkin in the Independent.