I can’t recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s 7,000-word article on The Pale King highly enough – not because he gets everything right, but because it’s what long-form writing about books should look like: passionate, lucid, wide-ranging, and awfully fun to read. I salute GQ for running it, and hope to see more literary coverage there in the future.
…And If You Still Want More on The Pale King
Motherhood: Another Form of Queerness
“Motherhood remains more of a choice for some than others, and yet our varying degrees of agency are rarely acknowledged by the mainstream narrative upheld by the vast majority of what has (disparagingly) been referred to as ‘mommy lit’.” An essay in Buzzfeed about pregnancy, queerness, and three upcoming memoirs about motherhood (and non-motherhood). Pair with: an essay about motherhood as muse.
Julie & Julia Revisited
Julie Powell “masters the art of French cooking” on her iPad.
Moonlighting as Ian Fleming
It’s rare that you find someone as eclectic as William Boyd. Not only did the British writer’s new play (based on two of Chekhov’s short stories) debut in London this week, his upcoming novel will star none other than James Bond. (If you’re wondering, his friend Daniel Craig is not how he pictures the superspy.)
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Liberals! Satiricists! Call Out the Big Dogs!
Steve Almond treks deeper into familiar territory in the latest issue of The Baffler, wherein the essayist takes on “our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” an undoubtedly strong “testament to our own impoverished comic standards.” Indeed, Almond notes, our satirists and comics today remain “careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”
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Dear Sugar’s Mugs
Last year, The Rumpus’ “Write Like a Motherfucker” mugs were so popular (um, I’m drinking coffee out of one right now), that this year, they’re offering two.
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The State of Literature in Translation Today
Chad Post ran the numbers to calculate “the state of literature in translation today,” and in so doing he found that AmazonCrossing has been publishing more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except Dalkey Archive. Additionally, the “overall number of works of fiction in translation being published in the U.S. is growing pretty nicely.” To get a full account of what’s coming out this year, check out his 2013 Translation Database.
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Wait, What Was I Writing About?
In a fantastic piece for Full-Stop, Jesse Miller checks out Nicholas Carr (whose book was picked in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Year in Reading), Paul La Farge, David Foster Wallace, and our diminishing ability to concentrate.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Strout, Lytal
A pair of books featured in our Great 2013 Book Preview hit shelves today: Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout’s fourth novel, The Burgess Boys, as well as Benjamin Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa.
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Also, Lev Grossman has a relatively lengthy rave in this week’s Time: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2062341,00.html
Great read. Almost as good as your NY Mag piece, Garth.