Roger Boylan at the Boston Review writes about the flourishing posthumous career of Mark Twain: “…more than 5,000 previously unknown letters of Twain’s have surfaced in the last 50 years. This represents an average of two new letters per week, but still only about one-tenth of the 50,000 or so he is believed to have written.” And at Slate, Craig Fehrman discusses the “brilliant brand management” behind the handling of Twain’s autobiography.
Mark Twain’s Posthumous Career
Football Book Club: Steven Millhauser’s ‘Edwin Mullhouse’
This week, Football Book Club will be reading Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse, as well as posting essays about Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, lamenting the awful truth about life without the NFL, and probably marveling at the insanity of L. Ron Hubbard.
Tom Stoppard on life, work, and fly-fishing
Tom Stoppard, recently tasked with writing the screenplays for the new Anna Karenina (six minutes of which can be watched here) and Parade’s End film and television adaptations, speaks at length with Victoria Glendinning about his life and work. At 75 years old, the playwright is hardly slowing down.
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James Franco’s Syllabus
Before James Franco’s class began, he assigned each of his students to conceive a short film inspired by a different C.K. Williams poem about “decay, but also a sense of memory and rejuvenation.” This November, the class will travel to Detroit to shoot the movie.
Love Letter Requiem
"I think of the book as a love letter in the form of a requiem." Our own Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel Station Eleven was recently shortlisted for the National Book Award, was interviewed for Omnivoracious about writing, apocalypse and the beauty of the modern world.
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Erdrich’s Love Medicine
In the latest from The Atlantic’s By Heart series, ex-Granta editor John Freeman discusses Louise Erdrich’s interpretation of Faulkner in Love Medicine. Pair with an essay on the pacing of Faulkner’s prose.
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Beautiful Again, and Interesting, and Modern
Have we entered into the age of New Modernism? Better yet, what does “New Modernism” even mean? Let regular Millions contributor Jonathan Russell Clark explain it to you in his essay for LitHub on George Saunders, Alexandra Kleeman, and experimental feeling. This Millions review of Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? is particularly relevant.
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