At the Daily Beast, Taylor Antrim analyzes Bret Easton Ellis, Jennifer Egan and the Gen-X midlife crisis: “Sad white guys! The culture’s lousy with them…”
The (Literary) Gen-X Midlife Crisis
Zadie Smith on The Social Network
“Why Facebook? Why this format?... The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the ‘Why’ of Facebook. He uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself...” Zadie Smith considers “Generation Why” and The Social Network at the New York Review of Books. Our own review of The Social Network by Sonya Chung can be found here.
Race In The Hunger Games
Anna Holmes takes a good look at Hunger Games Tweets, the Tumblr dedicated to rounding up the astonishing number of racist and culturally careless fans of Suzanne Collins' books. Later on, she mentions a University of Wisconsin study which found that "only 9% of the 3,400 children’s books published [in 2010] contained significant cultural or ethnic diversity."
Catstarter
"The most interesting writers we know, all asking and answering the same question: why can't we stop watching cat videos?" Coffee House Press one-ups all boring Kickstarter campaigns with Catstarter, a campaign to fund a book on cat videos and "how we decide what is good or bad art, or art at all."
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Newt’s Civil War Book
Newt Gingrich's recent rise in Republican primary polls has occurred in tandem with the release of his historical novel set in the Civil War. The result? Gingrich writes a notorious massacre out of his book, The Battle of the Crater.
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Just Listen
For this month's fiction podcast at the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reads two Jamaica Kincaid stories, "Girl" and "Wingless," following the publication of Kincaid's recent See Now Then.
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Writing to Win
Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker comments on why we still write to win prizes (and hails Mario Vargas Llosa for having “a lively personal life that includes once punching out another future laureate...Gabriel García Márquez, reportedly over something to do with Mrs. Vargas Llosa. The Nobel thus not only crowns a career but provides the basis for a fine future Javier Bardem/Antonio Banderas movie.”)