In his inaugural column for The New York Times Magazine, former New York Magazine critic Sam Anderson expands upon the idea he shared with us in his “Year in Marginalia,” his riff on our big Year in Reading series. And, as a sidebar to Anderson’s column, the Magazine has published a brief excerpt of John Brandon’s compelling essay from The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books (perhaps you’ve heard that title mentioned around here lately?)
More on Sam Anderson’s Marginalia
Semicolon Shenanigans
Need to spice up your writing? Try one of McSweeney's punctuation marks such as the Yellow-Winged Apostrophe, which likes "to 'peace out' of its obligation to indicate possession or contraction," or the Academic Ellipsis, which "is used by those who wish to demonstrate just how much more they know about how to use ellipses than you do."
The Master Gets a Trailer
The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s forthcoming film The Master was released this week. The film will be about a mercurial religion called “The Cause,” and the whole thing appears to be based on L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology.
●
●
The Best Lincoln
The Morning Edition crew sifts through nearly 15,000 biographies of Abraham Lincoln in order to determine the best of the best. Janet Potter, you have your work cut out for you.
●
●
Editorial Notes
“Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy [Gordon] Lish calls ‘consecution,’ the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense.” At Full-Stop, Daniel Green examines the editor's influence in a piece on Noy Holland’s new book.
●
●
Thoughts of the Enemy
In the new Granta, Adam Johnson writes about the mind-bending experience of traveling to North Korea, an experience which informed his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the saddest anecdote -- and there are a lot of sad anecdotes -- is the one about the North Korean tour guide who couldn’t believe the author didn’t want to buy knockoff goods.
●
●
“It takes time.”
Recommended Reading: Guernica has an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Men Explain Things to Me.
●
●
Changing Definitions
With the Internet endlessly reshaping, reforming, upending our lives, etc., it’s important to ask: what exactly constitutes a magazine these days?
●
●