“Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the ‘literary correspondence’ is something we’re well shot of – a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets.” Martin Amis reviews the recent collection of Philip Larkin’s love letters, Letters to Monica, at Guardian.
Martin Amis on Philip Larkin’s Love Letters
Purity from Prison
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” Barrett Brown reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Purity from prison. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book.
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Acts of gruesomely violent chivalry and vehicular aggression.
Yet another entry for the list of all time greatest single-purpose tumblrs: Witless Innuendo, bringing you "a collection of those end-of-review warnings from The New York Times' film critics."
Tuesday New Release Day: Vonnegut, Russo, Wood, Springsteen, Donoghue
Even as much of the Eastern U.S. is lashed by a massive storm, we have new books this week, skewing mostly to non-fiction, including Kurt Vonnegut's collected letters, Richard Russo's memoir Elsewhere, James Wood's collection of essays The Fun Stuff, and Peter Carlin's authorized biography of Bruce Springsteen. On the fiction side is Emma Donoghue's Astray.
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The Other Bill of Rights
“I can read whatever I want. No one can stop me. I can help other people read what they want. And no one can stop them.” Zoe Fisher for The Rumpus about being "a horny queer teenager" who found her home in libraries. Pair with a controversial piece from our own pages this week by Douglas Koziol, a bookseller exploring what to do with “a book that you not only find objectionable but also believe actually dangerous in the lessons it portends amidst such a politically precarious time?”
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The litigation is never dead. It’s not even past.
Last Thursday, Faulkner Literary Rights, the company controlling William Faulkner’s works, proved two things by suing Sony Pictures Classics: 1) that they finally got around to seeing Midnight In Paris (2011); and 2) that they’re not down with Woody Allen’s decision to include two of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s lines in Owen Wilson’s dialogue.
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