Newly minted Paris Review editor (and polymorphous enthusiast) Lorin Stein runs down some recent pleasures for More Intelligent Life. To wit: Lipsyte, Dickens, Du Maurier, Nádas, Merle Haggard, newcomer April Ayers Lawson, the Lydia Davis Proust, outer-borough maniacs, and “proletarian erotica”…not necessarily in that order.
Lorin Stein is Drowning in Honey
Slave Driver
Recommended Reading: Katherine Sunderland on Michael Bundock’s The Fortunes of Francis Barber.
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The Vollmann Wears Prada
Just in time for the publication of Kissing the Mask, it’s…Wilhelmina T. Vollmann! If this were a TLC album, it would be called Scarysexyapposite. (via)
Delphi for booklovers
John Warner, your personal Biblioracle, is taking his column to the Chicago Tribune‘s Printers Row. Tell him the last five books you’ve read and he’ll recommend something delicious, nourishing, or just plain good for your next great read. Visit the Biblioracle by sending him an email at: [email protected].
The End of Woman-Baiting
“What do women have to do with the internet? We submit that, at least in the eyes of media executives, women are the internet. Women, we mean the internet, are commanding a larger share of the traditional print market. The internet, we mean women, is less responsive to conventional advertising than to commenting, sharing, and other forms of social interaction. Women, we mean the internet, are putting men, we mean magazine editors, out of work. The internet, we mean women, never pays for its content — or for their drinks!” The editors at n + 1 take on the woman-baiting article.
Making It
China plans to spend millions “sprucing up” Gaomi, the hometown of recent Nobel winner Mo Yan.
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The New Face of Poetry
Denmark has a new superstar, and he’s a poet named Yahya Hassan. At 18, Hassan has published a poetry collection that sold 100,000 copies in three months — a figure that, in Denmark, translates to one copy for every fifty residents. At the LARB, Pedja Jurisic delves into the young poet’s incendiary politics.
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The Most Boring Man in the World
“With thirteen other diners, the two professors of English first prepared and then made their way through eight courses, including beef broth, haddock, steak, mutton, chicken, and chocolate profiteroles….The dinner was a recreation of one eaten 132 years earlier, in one of England’s grandest country houses. Among the guests at this first dinner was George Scharf, founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, a man not especially famous in his own day and virtually unknown in ours.” Love Among the Archives brings us into the world of George Scharf, a bachelor affectionately deemed “The Most Boring Man in the World.”
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