An excerpt from David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished novel, The Pale King, appears this week in The New Yorker. It’s good.
New DFW
Not a Title
In the first two lines of a piece in the latest New Yorker about the Alaskan poet Olena Kalytiak Davis, Dan Chiasson points out that her new book, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, has an undeniably excellent title. In describing her appeal, he says that her submissions to the canon are “anti-submissions,” by which he means that she actively rejects association with more famous poets. “Davis’s professed unworthiness is one of many tricky manifestations of her ambition,” he writes.
at the utmost limits of writing itself
Christian Bök wonders about the future of conceptual poetry:”How do we write poems in a world where a spambot, like @horse_ebooks, gets to write all the great lines…?”
Digital and Co.
Pirating versus purchasing used ebooks – who wins? Ayelet Waldman and John Scalzi discuss.
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Dark Investments
There are many flavors of noir, but the one that may be the most relevant to our lives today, Julia Ingalls argues, is corporate noir, which often takes the form of science fiction. At the LARB, she writes about several examples of the genre, including Alan Glynn’s Graveland and Natsuo Kirino’s Out.
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Financing Cloud Atlas
The multinational production of the (Millions favorite) Cloud Atlas movie, “in all its glorious confusion, also serves as a guidepost to the future of the film business.”
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Most Overrated Books
The Most Overrated Books of 2011 according to NY Daily News, and Steve Jobs is included?
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Book-Related Internet Graphics
Today in book-related graphics: The Arts Shelf has created an infographic measuring famous literature by word count, and The New York Times provides a handy, illustrated guide to any writers’ retreat, complete with authors’ cloisters and an “emergency idea generator.”
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