In one corner, Sarah Palin, the “bone-licker, shit-kicker, caribou-killer.” In the other, the gentle friend of animals, Jonathan Safran Foer. According to Macy Halford at the NYer blog, this fight’d be no contest.
Smackdown: Palin V. Foer
This Glorious Respite
“It is now, at this precise moment when I become woefully aware of the cruel transience of this seasonal offering, rarely lingering beyond the Marigold blooms of latter March, and at once I am lost amidst a magnificent vision, one in which our hallowed Saint Patrick himself is riding shotgun alongside me in this very Camry.” In which James Joyce orders a shamrock milkshake.
Art Spiegelman on the Lasting Power of ‘Maus’
Art Spiegelman on Maus, which is back in the news after being banned by a Tennessee school board.
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Get out of the restaurant
Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo’s Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. “All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries… it’s filler.”
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The Kindle Will Disappear Your Old Magazines
Gizmodo discovers that when you cancel a Kindle magazine subscription all the back issues that you’ve accumulated disappear.
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Introducing Full Stop
A new lit-focussed site has launched recently. Full Stop already has an impressive number of reviews on display alongside interviews with Gary Shteyngart and Charles Burns.
True Romance
We might mock romance readers for how much Kleenex they go through, but they’re more emotionally perceptive than others. A new study on the interpersonal sensitivity of readers found that romance readers are better at discerning facial cues and emotion than other literati. But don’t worry if you aren’t a Nicholas Sparks fan; reading any genre makes you more empathetic, as we’ve reported on before.
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Get Your First Edition Fix
Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore just launched a First Editions Club where members get a signed first edition of a new book each month. Some recent selections include: George Saunders’s Tenth of December (our review), Jonathan Dee’s A Thousand Pardons (our review), and Philipp Meyer’s The Son.
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