Will books in white wrappers become this year’s deer head? At The New York Times: Physical books find new life as design objects.
Book Decor
This Side of Criticism
F. Scott Fitzgerald called himself "a moralist at heart," which might be why Kathryn Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be "aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent."
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David Shields on the Colbert Report
Watch David Shields on the Colbert Report last week -- Colbert: "Are you the Vanilla Ice of novels?" Shields: "Precisely."
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Writing as Advocacy
“There’s this sense of guilt that my writing career is going well because black people are being killed. I’ve reached a point where I don’t know if I have anything new to say. It’s the same narrative over and over.” Debut novelist Brit Bennett gets profiled for The New York Times about The Mothers, which we included in the list of October book releases we're most excited about.
Stranger Than Fiction
This essay from Adrian Barnes at The Daily Beast on cancer and fiction and how the two mirror one another is eerie and fascinating. This review of Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby from The Millions addresses this tendency of writing and real world illnesses to feed of of one another.
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