keep reading about books too

If you, like a lot of book lovers (including moi), find yourself these days with your nose in front of your monitor more often than between the covers of a book, read some book blogs—like Wyatt Mason’s Sentences, at Harper’s. They’ll get your juices going.

The other day, introducing a recently rediscovered author, Mason wrote:

Meaningful art—however long it might take—always reaches its audience. Writers or painters who work in obscurity and struggle to get an agent or gallery to give them a shot will, if their work warrants attention, eventually get it. That the attention may be too little or come too late, that the artist in the interim will have a fittingly miserable time being overlooked and unsupported–these sad facts are common enough, as anyone who has read, say, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, understands.

The rediscovered author is Lamed Shapiro. Here’s what Mason writes about him:

This week on Sentences, I’ve featured the work of gifted writer Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948), of whom I’d not heard until last week. And yet the collection published by Yale University Press in 2007, Shapiro’s The Cross and Other Stories, is superior in every conceivable measure to any gathering of short stories I read in the past year.

Now, doesn’t that make you feel like reading those stories? If so, you’re in luck, because Mason reprinted one of them.

Read it.