From Publishing Perpectives.

The late Bob Goodman, Auckland bookseller extraordinaire and Proust authority wold have enjoyed this:

Can Proust Really Change Your Life?

By Dennis Abrams

You know you've been meaning to. You're pretty sure that you've got a dusty copy of Swann's Way sitting around somewhere. You've probably even read the book's famous opening line, "For a long time I would go to bed early," and thought to yourself, well, not now, maybe some other time.That time has finally come.

Next Monday, Publishing Perspectives is launching The Cork-Lined Room, a blog devoted to the reading, discussion and study of Proust's masterpiece of 20th century literature, In Search of Lost Time.

Join us, (there is safety in numbers) and see what you've been missing all these years.Should you need further encouragement, here are ten reasons why you should join in and make Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time your next big literary project.(read on ...)

Bonus Material: Salon Confidences Written by Marcel

By Edward NawotkaIf

Marcel Proust (pic above left in 1905) if famous for anything other than his novels, it's the "questionnaire" that bears his name. The "Proust Questionnaire" was not, surprise, something Proust himself conceived of - it was, instead, a Parisian parlor game popular during the 1880s. "It is believed to have been popularized by the daughter of the 19th-century French president Felix Faure," writes Graydon Carter in the introduction to Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, a collection of such questionnaires collected from the last 16 years of the magazine's history.As the story goes, Antoinette Faure would ask friends over for tea and then ask each of them an identical set of questions, such as "What is your favorite virtue? What is your idea of misery?" Her guests would then record the answers in a red leather journal.

(read on...)