Would you like your man-steak with green peppercorn sauce? At the LRB, Jenny Diski on Catalin Avramescu‘s Intellectual History of Cannibalism.
Man Eater
Well-informed ghosts
Kurt Anderson on the difference between writing a novel in first and third person voice: “Most third-person narrators are less like omniscient gods than exceedingly snoopy, well-informed ghosts. “
●
●
“The chorus needs to be real to make this work.”
Millions staffer Edan Lepucki contributed “Chorus” to Slate‘s Trump Story Project, an ongoing series of short fiction pieces written by contemporary authors.
●
●
Reporting from Collapse
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Year in Reading alumnus Brian Evenson about his A Collapse of Horses, literary horror, and philosophy.
The Charleston Bulletin
Sometimes, Virginia Woolf took a break from her busy schedule of constant brilliance in order to write children’s stories for her nephews’ newspaper, The Charleston Bulletin. A taste: “When in a good and merry mood Trisy would seize a dozen eggs, and a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, and then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, and catch them as they fell in dozens and dozens and dozens of pancakes.”
Grading Died Today
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. Don’t let this dissuade you from revising again and again, which can really improve a piece of writing.” Albert Camus, creative writing instructor.
●
●
High Book Marks
Lit Hub has created a Rotten Tomatoes for the literary world. Once a book receives three reviews, it is assigned a score on their new site, Book Marks. Alex Shephard asks if we might have a grade inflation problem.
●
●
Doug Rickard’s Google Photography
Photographer Doug Rickard employs an interesting technique for his “A New American Picture” series: Google Street View. Check out the shots he took while he “virtually [drove] the unseen and overlooked roads of America, to find bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned.”
●
●
Fact-checking Steinbeck
As John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author’s cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn’t set out to trash the Nobel laureate. “As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy,” Steigerwald tells the New York Times. “He liked guns; he liked property rights.”
●
●