A dissection of Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace finds Franzen’s wires showing.
A Gut-Wrenching Account and an Ethical Nightmare
Oratory Passion
The best Fourth of July speech? Frederick Douglass delivered it on July 5, 1852. Pair with a reading list for July.
Tuesday New Release Day: St. Aubyn, Erickson, Sendker, Mockingbird
This week sees the release of Edward St. Aubyn’s final “Patrick Melrose novel,” At Last. A new, omnibus edition of all the novels in the series is also out. Steve Erickson’s new novel These Dreams of You is out, as is The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, a debut effort set in Burma by German novelist Jan-Philipp Sendker. This week also sees the release, on Blu-ray, of the 50th anniversary edition of To Kill a Mockingbird.
the looking glass of this language
This National Geographic piece on the desire to document and preserve the world’s many dying languages is great.
“It’s all in the dark, all feeling around”
Speaking to Parul Sehgal, recent Booker and National Book Award finalist Jhumpa Lahiri confesses that in order to write, she must begin from “a place where I feel—and need to feel—completely alone and anonymous.” The Lowland author elaborates that the act of writing is “such an intimate thing; I can’t do it in front of other people. It’s a rich dimension in one’s head – to access it, the noise has to be shut off. And there is a lot of noise in the world.”
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Gosling to Direct His own Film
Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling will direct a “fantasy noir” film he wrote entitled How to Catch a Monster. It’ll star his Drive cast-mate Christina Hendricks.
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