“[M]ore people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art.” Who other than T.S. Eliot could get away with questioning the artistic quality of Hamlet?
The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot
Change
The New York Review of Books excerpts recent Nobel winner Mo Yan’s part fiction, part memoir Change.
New Trailer for T.C. Boyle
In 1998, T.C. Boyle released his first massive collection of short stories, titled, appropriately enough, Stories. Clocking in at 700+ pages, the book illustrated the zany profligacy of one our premier short fiction writers. Now Boyle has released a new collection — titled (of course) Stories II — and with it comes a new trailer.
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What They Want
Among the raft of news stories that came out about Facebook recently, you may have missed the company’s quiet revolution in grammar, signified by its adoption of the much-debated singular “they.” If thinking about this change makes you queasy, just remember that singular “they” has been around since the days of Chaucer. (Related: Fiona Maazel on bad grammar.)
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Dark Investments
There are many flavors of noir, but the one that may be the most relevant to our lives today, Julia Ingalls argues, is corporate noir, which often takes the form of science fiction. At the LARB, she writes about several examples of the genre, including Alan Glynn’s Graveland and Natsuo Kirino’s Out.
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If A Boy Could Dream
“I was a fraud in a field of language, which is to say, I was a writer.” Ocean Vuong on immigrating into English and the first poem he ever wrote.
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