“Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.” The New Yorker posts a new short story, “Backbone,” by David Foster Wallace.
New Short Story by DFW
Appearing Elsewhere
Bet you didn’t know this Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the first “going postal” shootings in Oklahoma. I have a piece at The Morning News examining America’s export of this peculiar brand of spree killings around the world, most recently to Oslo, Norway.
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Patron Half-Elephant
Francine Prose has an idiosyncratic theory that the Hindu god Ganesh is a vital part of her writing process. In a VQR essay, she explains that her portrait of the deity (which she purchased forty years ago at a bazaar in Mumbai) gives her a kind of confidence that goes beyond superstition. As support for this belief, she points out that Ganesh is known in some quarters as “the writer’s god.”
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A Muppety Man
Remember the Muppet movie when Kermit has an existential crisis about time? Yeah, we never saw that one either. But a new biography of Jim Henson, Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones, discusses Henson’s early experimental filmmaking (sans puppets) and plans to open a psychedelic nightclub in the 1960s. You can watch the aforementioned trippy short film “Time Piece.”
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The Kite and the String
“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.” The Atlantic has an excellent contribution to the age-old thesis that creativity and madness are inextricably linked–and tied, moreover, to mental illness–based in part on a sample of students at Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Pair with another essay on creativity and the “touch of madness” from our own archives.
“I’ve known you and known you and known you.”
Recommended Reading: Delaney Nolan’s recent piece in Guernica, “How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Perotta, Johnson, Pelecanos, Torres, Fonts, Murray
New this week: The Leftovers by Tom Perotta, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, The Cut by George Pelecanos, Justin Torres’s debut We the Animals, and Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. And new in paperback is Millions Hall of Famer Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.
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uh, thought this was actually an excerpt from his upcoming, posthumously published, novel…