If you didn’t like Elif Batuman‘s gut-punch to MFA writing (“Get A Real Degree”) in this issue of the London Review of Books, might I suggest Jenny Diski’s cudgeling of self-help lit in the LRB’s Diary essay?
Lady Boxers at the LRB
Effing up The New Yorker
Mary Norris on the cusswords permitted to run in The New Yorker over the years. Sadly, the piece is not titled “Fuck This Shit.“
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Solitary Reader
Rebecca Solnit writes on loneliness, intimacy, and writing in The Faraway Nearby. Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed the book at The Millions.
To Burn, or Not To Burn
The Russian Ministry of Culture has come under fire recently after accusations were levied by the Russian Writers’ Union of some 500 books having been removed from libraries by authorities in the Komi republic–and another fifty allegedly incinerated in the process. Most of these were textbooks published with money from the Soros Fund, run by hedge fund billionaire and very vocal Putin critic George Soros. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture has denied the accusations, stating that “if any books are declared ‘extremist’ through a court proceeding, they are put into the special list of the ministry of justice and immediately withdrawn from libraries. However, even in this case books are not destroyed, they are just not lent out to readers.”
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Lego My Struggle
“Each one of those books is, like, several hundred pages long. So, that’s a lot of romantic anxiety and adolescent/young-adult/middle-aged angst to distill into pictures, but as far as I can tell, it’s all there: salted fish, shower-sex, alcohol-induced existential despair, the whole shebang! No reading required.” The Melville House blog, MobyLives, revisits the work of an anonymous artist who reenacted all of Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s My Struggle series using LEGOs. See also: our review of Knausgaard’s epic.
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Now That’s What I Call an Elastic Product!
Meet the latest woman to join the “Billionaire’s Club.” Her name is Sara Blakely, and she invented Spanx.
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Rich Reading
At a loss for what to read? Goldman Sachs has released their reading list. “We’re talking about people who incurred $550 million in fines for schemes to turn a profit on the civilization-threatening financial crisis they themselves had helped create, and the line between genius and chutzpah is notoriously hard to draw, so, yeah, I’d like to know what’s on these folks’ bedside tables.” Our own Hannah Gersen wrote about Occupy Wall Street and Bartleby, the Scrivener.
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Not Very Titillating
Those of you who know the joy of reading romance novels with your friends have probably wondered at some point what people who write erotica are like. Are they bankers and professionals? Housewives and mistresses? Are they some combination of all of the above? At Slate, a chaste look at the lives of unchaste writers.