Love life of the Colorado beetle

At the NYRB, John Banville on the latest volumes of Beckett's letters.

Swan songs

It is tempting to introduce this piece by John Banville about Harold Bloom's latest book under a rubric something like "Banville reads Bloom so you don't have to," but really it is a sympathetic and effective summary of some high points, and reminds me of what a great impression Bloom made on me when I took his Shakespeare seminar many years ago at Yale:

At a fundamental level, all of Bloom's work constitutes a sustained superlative for the Bard. "As a secularist with Gnostic proclivities," he writes, "and above all as a literary aesthete, I preach Bardolatry as the most benign of all religions." For him, simply, "Shakespeare is God".

Also: Diana Nyad, marathon swimmer.