Are you lover or writer of florid longwinded codswollop? The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest might be for you.
Sublimely Bad?
Sedaris’s Story Comes to the Big Screen
After years of rebuffing film deals and movie rights offers, David Sedaris has finally allowed one of his stories to be made into a motion picture. This month, you’ll be able to check out University of Miami alum Kyle Alvarez’s adaptation of “C.O.G.” (Child of God). You can check out a trailer over here.
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The Marriage Plot Problem
Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
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Two New Marilynne Robinson Books In the Works
Marilynne Robinson is at work on a book about the Old Testament, says Casey N. Cep on Twitter. Word on the street is that it won’t come out until after she finishes Lila, her third book set in the Gilead universe.
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On (Not) Being a Mother
“The lie I told most often in my twenties during the Reagan era was that I liked other people’s children although I didn’t intend to have my own.” For The Rumpus, Kyoko Mori writes an essay on the choice to raise animals instead of children. Pair with: an essay on the complexities of motherhood.
Action!
Recommended Reading: This lengthy piece from The New York Times on the history of Yiddish theater from schtick to stardom.
NO MORE
The US Navy will no longer write its internal communiques in all caps. Maybe they got tired of the sense that they were constantly shouting?