Footnotes, July 2021: Book links from around the web

At The Reading List, we’re trainspotters when it comes to interesting book links, and here are a number that caught our eye.

A small Cape Town library, born in gangland in a shipping container, is featured on NPR.
‘Be gentle with yourself – or with others’ – sane advice from a 400-year-old self-help book.
If you’re into audiobooks, neo-noir film and Jennifer Jason Leigh, check out Quentin Tarantino’s debut work of fiction, Once upon a Time in Hollywood.
We’re all super into dogs now, right? If yes, dig into this piece from the Paris Review, in which the late Argentine writer Hebe Uhart languidly and perceptively interviews an eccentric collection of dog owners in Buenos Aires.
Douglas Stuart, author of the 2020 Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain, did a Reddit AMA.
Should the flawed character of an artist should be allowed to supersede his work? Daphne Merkin, who was once proposed to by Philip Roth, considers the brewing scandal surrounding his and his biographer’s sexual histories.
Oh ja, and said biographer has found a new US publisher.
Colson Whitehead’s award-winning dystopian novel The Underground Railroad as ‘a mostly straightforward and realistic account of a slave’s escape’ and the terrifying potential of speculative fiction.
Childhood nostalgia alert! Jacques’ Redwall books are to be adapted into a feature film and series by Netflix.
‘I’m Easily Bored by Books,’ Says Writer of 22 Novels. (Paywalled unfortunately.)
A group of libraries and museums in the UK managed to raise £15m to save an ‘astonishing’ lost library – packed with works by Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and Walter Scott – from private buyers.
How Oscar Wilde ruined his life: The playwright was the toast of London in 1895 — until he decided to sue his lover’s father.
‘Dear Footnotes editor, I’m into ASMR and 19th century Russian Realism, and I don’t know where to turn!’ Don’t worry fam, we gotchu.