My inner dramatist will have a debut outing at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers, Thurs. 12/2 at 7:30 pm, Three of Cups (First Ave at 5th Street, NYC). Actor Tonya Edmonds will perform an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Sebastian & Frederick. Other featured writers: Ed Park, Amanda Filipacchi, Jonathan Dixon, Maya Pindyck.
Sonya Chung at Sweet: Actors Reading Writers
OWS lit down the line?
Christian Lorentzen wonders, in Book Forum, what the first OWS novels will be like. He anticipates them showing up next year, but I’m thinking we’ve already got at least two, though they were both published well before Occupy: Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story ought to fit the bill, and, of course, there’s that famous Melville story about Wall Street, but I’d prefer not to talk about it when I could just direct you to Hannah Gersen’s piece instead.
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More on the Ailing Humanities
Adding to the general hand-wringing over the state of the humanities, Lee Siegel contradicts Leon Wieseltier’s lament that fewer college students are majoring in literature by contending that modern literature courses ruin the joy of reading. “For every college professor who made Shakespeare or Lawrence come alive for the lucky few,” he writes, “there were countless others who made the reading of literary masterpieces seem like two hours in the periodontist’s chair.” (You can also read a similar argument from a humanities professor in The New Republic.)
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Introducing Full Stop
A new lit-focussed site has launched recently. Full Stop already has an impressive number of reviews on display alongside interviews with Gary Shteyngart and Charles Burns.
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My Life
Peg Plunkett was an 18th-century Dublin courtesan who decided one day to make some money by publishing a series of memoirs. Now, over two hundred years after Plunkett sketched out her life story, Professor Julie Peakman has rewritten all three volumes for a modern audience. In a piece for The New Statesman, Sarah Dunant reviews her edition of Plunkett’s oeuvre.