Narrative, a great online literary magazine, has a new issue out featuring a new story by Rick Bass and a classic by Frank Conroy. You can sign up for a free “subscription” to get access to the above stories as well as everything in their archives.
New Narrative
The New York Times ‘Funny Pages’
No the Times isn’t getting comics, but they are taking a cue from the New Yorker by adding a graphic novel-type comics section to the Sunday magazine. Everybody’s been saying for years that “graphic novels” are on the cusp of taking the book world by storm. Is this a step in that direction? The first artist to appear will be, you guessed it, Chris Ware. Get the gory details here.
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From the Newstand: Bookforum on Political Fiction
In the current issue of Bookforum, David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times picks up and runs with a topic we’ve written about here – the current boom in fiction about the counterculture of the ’60s. Ulin’s long essay, called “Go Start Anew,” revisits recent books by Christopher Sorrentino, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, and Zachary Lazar (whose “Year in Reading” picks bespeak a certain fascination with the ’60s). Moreover, Ulin asks why the curdling of Aquarian idealism speaks so strongly to the current moment. I’m not sure I agree with his answer, but the argument is, as usual, provocative and deeply felt. It’s a Bookforum highlight, as is the entire “Fiction and Politics” supplement, and we urge you to check it out.
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Socialism Vs. the Beautiful Game
Millions readers who follow European soccer, the progress of democratic socialism, or international tax policies may be interested in Jonathan Last’s article in the Weekly Standard this week about how Gordon Brown’s recent tax hike – from 40% to 50% on the top tax bracket – is decimating the English Premier League. (And yes, I mean that Weekly Standard – the one edited by Bill Kristol, the one so many love to hate.)According to Last and others (like Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger), the Premier League’s inability to keep or attract players like Cristiano Ronaldo (who left Manchester United this transfer season for Real Madrid for a record 80 million pounds), the Brazilian striker Kaka (who spurned a 100 million pound offer from Manchester City to go to Real Madrid for less), Karim Benzima, Franck Ribery, Samuel Eto’o, David Villa, and Jermaine Pennant can all be traced to England’s new 50% income tax and the falling value of the pound. That and Spain’s 2005 “Beckham Law” that allows high-earning “foreign executives” a special tax rate of only 24% rather than 43%, its usual top-bracket rate. The Spanish law is so named because David Beckham was the first foreign national to be given this status – and because the law was backdated to 2003, the year he joined Real Madrid from Manchester United.
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Let’s hope the publishing industry doesn’t get any ideas
Soon after learning that books are, quite literally, cool, we now find that reading may become a more popular pastime in Thailand, but not because of a sudden interest in all things literary.Bomb worries help book sales: After New Years Eve bomb blasts put Bangkok on edge, “Thailand’s book market looks likely to grow by 10% this year, partly thanks to the new-found preference of many to stay at home rather than going out.”Reading: a good way to pass the time in the bomb shelter.
Short Fiction Ripped From the Headlines
I wasn’t a big fan of Joyce Carol Oates’ story “Landfill” in last week’s New Yorker. It felt to me a little too obvious, this story about an insecure college student’s drunken and accidental death thanks to the carelessness of the brothers at the fraternity where he was a pledge. It seemed too “ripped from the headlines,” too after school special, and on top of all that it was emotionally cheap – designed to provoke outrage with little complexity. So, it was interesting to discover that Oates’ story was indeed ripped from the headlines. The death of Hector Jr. very closely resembles that of a young man who had attended The College of New Jersey, so much so that Oates was compelled to apologize “for any offense she caused.”Obviously, quite a lot of fiction is drawn from real life events, but I think in this case, because Oates’ story was so one-note and so geared toward generating disgust, the connection was simply to stark to ignore. (via Jeff)
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Alas, Poor…?
Reuters’ “Oddly Enough” column ventures this week into the realm of literary history and intrigue: The mystery of Schiller’s skull. When he died of tuberculosis in his forties, Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, playwright, and philosopher, was buried in a mass grave. Several decades later, the mass grave was dug up and Schiller’s skull identified by comparison with his death mask and its size, and placed in a more distinguished tomb in the city of Weimar. In 1911, the mass grave was turned up again and another skull found that was claimed to be the real memento mori. This second skull was also placed in Schiller’s tomb.Now, DNA researchers attempting to tell the true skull from the false by comparison with DNA samples taken from Schiller’s relatives, have discovered that neither is a match.In one of Lucian of Samosata’s second century Dialogues of the Dead, Diogenes tells Pollux that in death, “man and man are as like as two peas… when it comes to bare skull and no beauty.”So it would seem.