William Blake may have described its “green and pleasant land” but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
More DFW Books on the Way
The steady stream of books about and by David Foster Wallace is continuing in 2012. We already noted the forthcoming Conversations with David Foster Wallace, and the calendar now also includes The Legacy of David Foster Wallace from the University of Iowa’s New American Canon series, D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, and Both Flesh and Not, a collection of as yet uncollected nonfiction by Wallace.
The Great (Literary) Depression
“Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range.” Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
Wilkinson on Larsen
At the Washington Times, Emily Colette Wilkinson reviews Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.
The Door to Another World
Recommended Reading: A new short story by Whiting Award-winner Alice Sola Kim.
The Top Journalism of the Decade
A group at NYU’s journalism school has named “The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.” Four of these are books: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.
Shadowplay
Did his Nobel Prize win a couple years ago pique your interest in Patrick Modiano? Here’s another essay to sate it. In The Paris Review, Alice Kaplan examines his literary project.
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”
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