Sometime Millions writer Frank Kovarik plumbs the connections between George Saunders’ recent story in The New Yorker and David Foster Wallace’s suicide.
Saunders Meets DFW
The Bad Luck Club
By the age of twenty-one, Eugene O’Neill had dropped out of Princeton, fathered a child and caught syphilis on a trip through South America. He was, in his own words, “the Irish luck kid,” blessed in a strange way with misfortune. Yet he went on to win a Pulitzer eleven years later. How did he do it? In the LRB, John Lahr reads a new biography of the playwright.
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Guys Lit Wire Book Fair
Guys Lit Wire is a group blog dedicated to “recommending books for teenage boys.” Twice a year, the group hosts a book fair in conjunction with Powell’s to help school libraries. For the past couple of years, the group has focused on Washington D.C.’s Ballou Senior High School, and this year their fair will run until October 14th. Please do check out the “wish list” and send a couple books in Ballou’s direction!
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Web 3.0: How Do We Pay for This?
The Present Group provides an interactive look at “how artists, cultural producers, and content providers have experimented with funding and support models during the Internet Age.” The scrolling timeline spans from 1998 through 2016, and it outlines the major innovations (and failures) as websites tried monetizing.
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Living with Books
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Acquiring the Vanities
The New York Public Library just acquired Tom Wolfe's archives for $2.15 million. They include 190 boxes of drafts, outlines, and research for his articles and books as well as 10,000 letters from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese. But the library missed the opportunity to get one of his famous white suits because as Wolfe said, "Those are the things I really can’t part with." Here's one of our favorite Wolfe essays, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s."
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What’s A Guy Got to Write to Get a Bridge Named After Him?
Frank McNally investigates the “dark forces at work somewhere” that prevent Flann O’Brien from being honored with a Dublin bridge. Perhaps we should all start a grassroots campaign to send Mark O’Connell’s O’Brien tribute to Irish civil engineers.
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The One I Love
Recommended Reading: Sarah Sansolo on her childhood obsession with Britney Spears.
Lambda Literary Award Finalists
Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Award Finalists, who were announced this week. Finalists include Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Spender (our review of his memoir), and Truman Capote.
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