Attention New Yorkers: The 2010 PEN World Voices Festival kicks off today with Claire Messud, Lorraine Adams, and Norman Rush. Update: Audio of this stimulating discussion of diversity in literature is available at WNYC. And it looks like many World Voices events will be streaming live at the PEN Website, accessible whether you hang your hat in New York or Nome (or Wasilla). Tonight catch Patti Smith, Rodrigo Frésan, and Salman Rushdie.
PEN World Voices Begins
Metoosexuals
At The Daily Beast, Lizzie Skurnick writes about hip fatherhood, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon.
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Need something to read?
If you’re in need of a great read this week, you’ll be glad to know that Byliner has compiled a list of 101 spectacular nonfiction stories from 2011. They run the gamut from investigative to personal to borderline trivial: There’s Mac McClelland’s incredibly daring and disturbing essay on working through PTSD through controlled sexual violence, alongside Jon Mooallem’s history of the high five. Happy reading!
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Slow Down, September!
There was a lot going on this September. Luckily, the good folks over at The Literary Hub have provided us with this helpful list of five of the best new books September had to offer. A personal favorite includes Emily Donoghue’s The Wonder, in which the protagonist appears to be subsisting on nothing but water.
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For Your Weekend
Slate offers up a treatise on “the greatness of gin.” (via my friend Derek, who wrote: “for your book blog; there is too little booze on it”)
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Mutual Self-Interest in Bad Decline
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, America needs George Saunders. Fortunately, the editors at The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs blog appear to understand this.
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Wells Tower’s Fairy Tale
Recommended Viewing: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned author Wells Tower reads an original fairy tale entitled, “The Chinese Person.”
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Greil Marcus on The Doors, Pauline Kael, and James Wolcott
In an interview for The Atlantic, Greil Marcus talks about his new book The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years. Later on, however, he tosses off his gloves to dismiss the bits about Pauline Kael in James Wolcott’s memoir Lucking Out. “I’m not really interested in what Jim has to say about Pauline,” Marcus says. “He became an acolyte of Pauline’s in a way that was embarrassing to read, when he was mimicking her and celebrating her in The Village Voice.“
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