Hallstatt, Brontë Biopic, Depression-Era Travel, Cover Reveals & More: Endnotes 25 June

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

That’s the village of Hallstatt in Austria, perched on the shore of Hallstatt Lake. It has pretty much everything you could ask for in a fairy tale summer getaway: 16th-century Alpine houses, cafés with views overlooking the lake, boat rides on the lake, cobbled alleys, an ossuary, a salt mine, hiking trails, a waterfall, and a funicular railway to whisk you above the rooftops. {more}

• Handy advice for your next dinner party: tips for proper etiquette at the dining table of a manor house.

• This abandoned German ballroom would be the perfect venue for an off-kilter circus (or roller derby).

• Sure, you’re probably on a first-name basis with Agatha (Christie), Dorothy (L. Sayers), and maybe even Dame Ngaio (Marsh). But have you read the sharp writing of Elizabeth Bowen?!

• Prevailing opinion is that the 1937 film Ready, Willing, and Able is only a so-so musical. But everyone loves this tap-dancing scene on a giant typewriter.

• This art nouveau house is truly fab.

• A little-known facet of the New Deal is fascinating and left behind remarkable artifacts: The Rich, Weird, and Frustrating World of Depression-Era Travel Guides. ‘The American Guides were unusual not only for their shaggy opulence and Americana maximalism, but also for their source of funding: the federal government.’

• Dialect coach Erik Singer is a tour guide to different accents across English-speaking North America.

• I love the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel to an embarrassing degree, so I was happy to see that she’s won her second Walter Scott Prize. (How much do I love it, you ask? I listened to all three books on audio back-to-back — 77 hours total — and I already have tickets to see the stage production of The Mirror & the Light in London in November.)

• Where are my grammar nerds? Getting real about the difference between each and every.

• 7 Fiction Podcasts for Fans of Epistolary Novels. I’m planning to give both Within the Wires and Mabel a try.

• Anne Louise Avery regularly uses her Twitter to post microfiction about adorable forest animals. This is a recent favorite — click through to read the sweet ending.

• A bedroom in a 16th-century bell tower?! Yes, please. (You need to see this abandoned church that was converted into a dreamy home.)

• The highest railway in America — The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway in Colorado — is back on track. The ride up Pikes Peak, in newly-cushioned comfort, offers spectacular views. And the red train cars are so cute!

• When art and sports collide… — a look at football, running, tennis, and croquet, captured in fine art.

• Victoria Schwab revealed the cover of her upcoming novel Gallant; I can’t wait to read it: ‘The story of a girl haunted by ghouls and a garden wall and the thing that waits beyond in this standalone novel in the vein of Crimson Peak + Secret Garden.’

• Also very excited about the cover reveal for Deanna Raybourn’s seventh (!) Veronica Speedwell adventure An Impossible Imposter.

• 13 cute, crazy, and downright weird animals you’ve probably never heard of. BRB, going to Japan to adopt a Raccoon Dog.

• LitHub asks if this is the best book club ever. Pretty sure the answer is yes. ‘Unlike many book clubs, which involve a lot of sitting and not much excitement, every month the Bushwick Book Club gathers to present original work—mostly songs, but sometimes poems, meals, and cocktails—based on the book they read.’

• Frances O’Connor, the writer-director of the upcoming Emily Brontë movie, talked to Variety about her experience making the film. ‘[Emily] goes on a true journey that she initiates to find out who she is. And at the end of it, she knows who she is, and then from that she can write and express herself. That’s something I really believe in: that you have to take the time to do that. But it’s not about becoming a perfect person, but just becoming a person.”

• This is a whopper of a headline: Rogue comma, which exposed a literary fraud: A page-turning story of greed, class, and ingenious sleuthing. As leading libraries fight to save the Bronte family’s papers, how the rare books expert who once owned some of them was exposed as a forger.

• Live footage of me cleaning our flat’s windows this week:

May you find a new way to accomplish an old trick.

Top image courtesy of Creative Travel Projects/Shutterstock.