Ruth Franklin rises to the defense of much-maligned (and newly retranslated) Emma Bovary.
Madame Bovary, Say Wha?
Tuesday New Release Day: Rash, Evenson, Sontag, Wallace
New this week are Ron Rash’s The Cove, Brian Evenson’s Immobility, and Volume Two of Susan Sontag’s Journals (all books highlighted in our January preview). Out in paperback this week is David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, from which we recently ran a previously unpublished excerpt.
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Fifty Years of Naked Lunch
A Friday afternoon pharmacy lesson at Stop Smiling: an interview with William Boroughs, celebrating 50 years of Naked Lunch.
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This is a nice surprise.
The latest installment of #LitBeat is up! Jerry Stahl, Tom Bissell, Krys Lee, and (Millions staff picked) Lauren Groff went head-to-head for the glory of being crowned the victor last Friday in a very special made-for-TV version of Literary Death Match in L.A.
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Coming Out of the Woodwork
“Suddenly, it seems like gay characters are everywhere in Y.A. literature. Or, if not everywhere, certainly in far more places and in a greater variety than ever before.”
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Write Fast
Tony Tulathimutte offers advice on lowering word count: Merge scenes, murder characters, quit writing altogether: “merge scenes, murder characters, ‘start as close to the end as possible’ (Kurt Vonnegut), quit writing altogether.” Pair with this Millions piece on writing slowly and by hand.
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It’s not plagiarism… it’s angloglobalisation?
On the London Review of Books blog, Kaya Genç makes the case that the similarities between the successful Turkish author Elif Şafak’s work and Zadie Smith’s books is a fact of Turkey’s shifting cultural values rather than plagiarism: “Istanbul, the city Shafak returned to after writing her book in London and the setting for many of her earlier novels, resembles London more and more.” For a bit of context, here’s Lydia Kiesling’s rundown of the initial scandal.
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With Very Small Font, Of Course
Ireland debuted a new stamp featuring a 224-word short story written by Dublin teenager Eoin Moore.
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Nabokov Pitches Hitchcock
Remember that time Vladimir Nabokov pitched Alfred Hitchcock a melodramatic love story about a girl and an astronaut? No? Read all about it.
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