As far as odd bedfellows go, it hardly gets any odder than literature and action figures. Which is why we’re all over these literary action figures. Roam the wide spectrum of genres and time periods with Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and, of course, William Shakespeare.
Then of course, things can get ugly. Brönte Sisters power dolls, we’re looking at you:
Also of note, though not action-capable, is this delightful and beautifully crafted series of Little Giants vinyl toys by Jailbreak Collective, available in a few collections: Writers (Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Willam Shakespeare and James Joyce), Scientists (Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and Nikola Tesla), and Artists (Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Vincent VanGogh and Pablo Picasso).
If anyone gets wind of a Susan Sontag action figure, let us know — we’ll trade a kidney for it.
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What Dracula, liquid nitrogen and hackers have to do with IKEA furniture.
Cookbooks are no longer the fascination of foodies alone. After featuring the designerly The Geometry of Pasta, we began noticing the deluge of incredibly exciting and cross-disciplinary treats disguised as cookbooks being released this season, spanning domains as diverse as art, molecular science, travel photography, hisotry, classical literature, and geek culture. Here are 5 of our favorite new cookbooks inspired by more than just food.
The book features original artwork by illustrator Jean-François Martin, whose work has graced the pages of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Times, and a slew of other beacons of modern journalism.
From caramel apples from Snow White’s stepmother to The Big Bad Wolf’s pig-in-the-blanket special to Brutus’ Caesar salad, this scrumptious gem of a book, fresh out of the Flammarion & Rizzoli publishing oven, delivers unexpected home-style recipes by way of your favorite fairy tales and literary classics.
If curiosity is your favorite ingredient and you’re more interested in the science of what happens to food beyond the blind following of recipe instructions, then Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food is your new favorite pastime. Part science book, part playground for culinary experimentation, the book offers more than 400 pages of recipes, tips and — our favorite part — interviews with some of today’s most iconic geeks across all disciplines: Writers, hackers, food scientists, knife experts, chefs, researchers and more.
Not surprisingly, this treat comes from an author with a fittingly cross-disciplinary background and indiscriminate curiosity — Jeff Potter, who studied computer science and visual art at Brown University, has used cooking with friends as a sanity anchor throughout his prolific career as an entrepreneur.
THAI STREET FOOD
Thai Street Food from scholar David Thompson takes us on an exciting journey into one of the Far East’s most widely adored cuisines with recipes that are both authentic and approachable.
It also doesn’t hurt that the book features some of the best food photography we’ve seen in years, making it as much a self-standing photography coffeetable book as it is a practical cookbook.
OAXACA AL GUSTO
Legendary British writer and researcher Diana Kennedy may be best-known as the Julia Childs of Mexican cuisine and in her latest book offers an ambitious exploration of one of the world’s most colorful cuisines. Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy features over 300 rare recipes and exclusive photographs of Oxaca’s little-known yet outstanding foods and their preparation, often guarded for centuries in family recipe books.
Among the highlights is a special chapter devoted to the three pillars of the Oaxacan regional cuisines — chocolate, corn, and chiles.
MODERNIST CUISINE
Nathan Myhrvold may be better-known as Microsoft’s former Chief Technology Officer, who studied quantum science alongside legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, but his true passion lies at the intersection of science and food. Myhrvold trained as a chef at LaVarenne in Burgundy, France, and has spent the past three years in a laboratory in Bellevue, Washington, perfecting — with his seven full-time chefs — the elaborate cooking techniques of gastronomy’s recent mega-obsession: molecular cuisine.
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is the pinnacle of his experimentation, a 2,400-page, six-volume behemoth with over 1,000 recipes that transform the kitchen into a lab. Needless to say, expectations for the ambitious undertaking have been gargantuan, which made gastronomers all the more unsettled by the recent announcement that due to packaging concerns, the book — which weighs over 48 pounds — won’t be available until March, nearly four months past the publication date originally promised.
Modernist Cuisine isn’t for everyone — besides the hardcore foray into ingredients like methylcellulose and agar approached with cooking techniques that involve liquid nitrogen and rotary evaporators, the book comes with a hefty $625 price tag. (Though Amazon is currently running a preorder discount of 20%, which clocks in at the non-negligible sum of $125 in savings.)
BONUS
Granted, this book isn’t for sale yet, but it’s too cool for us not to mention — IKEA has recently partnered with legendary art photographer Carl Kleiner to produce Hembakat är Bäst (Homemade Is Best), a new baking book featuring absurdly beautiful, artful photographs of deconstructed ingredients accompanying the recipes. Arranged by color and touched with the magical art direction wand of brilliant minimalism, the ingredients are photographed before their preparation into pastries, presenting a peculiar retroappreciative approach to food as art.
No word yet on when and where the book will be available, but it’s now firmly planted on our to-hunt-down-and-devour list.
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The excellent Paris Review has just opened up its archive, a half-century worth of fascinating interviews with some of the greatest literary figures in modern history. From William Faulkner to Stephen King, the archive spans hundreds of interviews taken between the 1950s and today.
We’ve curated 10 quotes from 10 of our favorite interviews.
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.” ~ Anthony Burgess
Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.” ~ Susan Sontag
I’ve always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I’ve always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I’ve always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. It’s that, rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir
Now, if you don’t like that, Berrigan, that’s the history of my family. They don’t take no shit from nobody. In due time I ain’t going to take no shit from nobody. You can record that.” ~ Jack Kerouac
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.” ~ Ray Bradbury
It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?” ~ Woody Allen
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.” ~ Maya Angelou
When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That’s why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends… well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, ‘Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!’ I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.” ~ William S. Burroughs
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
The series is also available in book form, as a four-volume box set that we highly recommend — a priceless timecapsule of cultural history.
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Stick-to-itiveness, the case for self-delusion, and what Steve Jobs has to do with illegal phones.
It is often said that the key to happiness and fulfillment is finding the one activity that puts us in a state of “flow” — the kind of work immersion in which makes us lose track of time, transcend thirst and hunger, and get “in the zone.” So discovering and pursuing this passion is integral to our life satisfaction. But the road to discovery and pursuit isn’t always a smooth or straight one.
Opening Lines is a wonderful project exploring how famous writers, artists, musicians, innovators, philosophers and politicians got their start, pushing past bumpy beginnings towards epic triumphs. Bob Dylan puts it beautifully in a 1963 interview
I used to play the guitar when I was ten, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that’s my little gift. Like somebody can make a cake, or somebody else can saw a tree down, and other people write… Maybe I got a better gift. But as of right now, I haven’t found out what it is.
The Opening Lines editors scour libraries, archives and the web, even conducting original interviews, to unearth how cultural icons went about pursuing their passions in those early days when setbacks were prolific, rejection unabashed and affirmation scarce. From legendary physicist Stephen Hawking to Mashable’s Pete Cashmore to guitar legend Jimmy Page, the project covers an impressively rich and cross-disciplinary spectrum of mavericks and masterminds, go-getters and geniuses.
In his magnificent 1990 commencement speech, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson reflects on his career as a cartoonist and creative rebel:
[I]t’s worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success… I still haven’t drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Some of my favorites: How Steve Jobs and The Woz started out making illegal phones; Francis Ford Coppola and his early skin flicks; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on overcoming internet addiction and aimlessness to build today’s most robust reservoir of human knowledge; how Malcolm X battled a cornucopia of addictions to unearth his true calling and become one of the most inspirational human beings in modern history; and artist Raghava KK, who shares his creative evolution in this entertaining and illuminating TED talk:
At its core, Opening Lines is about providing that little boost of inspiration for those discouraged in the pursuit of their creative passions. It’s a reminder that the myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — and that, as Thomas Edison famously remarked, stick-to-itiveness is an essential component of getting anywhere worth going.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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Brain Pickings remains free (and ad-free) and takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in what I do, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up. 
RECIPE FOR MURDER
COOKING FOR GEEKS
THAI STREET FOOD
OAXACA AL GUSTO
MODERNIST CUISINE
It is often 
