And now for something completely different… The Wire reimagined as a Victorian novel and analyzed in a funny, yet sharp satire piece.
The Wire as a Victorian Novel
The Fitzgeralds in Comic Form
This is the best comic about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald you’ll read all day, I promise.
Poison in the Plot
Agatha Christie could actually kill you. She studied pharmacology and learned how to create poisons, which led to her use of poisons in her novels. You could also read Daniel Friedman’s essay on solving the mystery of how to close a crime novel.
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“Yesterday / Is two days before tomorrow”
Recommended Reading: “Yesterday,” Haruki Murakami’s new piece in The New Yorker. (I’ll give you one guess to name the band it’s about.) And speaking of Murakami, his latest novel has an official book trailer now.
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Something Borrowed, Something Stolen
Is Kenneth Goldsmith continuing to lead the charge in a revolutionary poetry movement? Has he overstepped his bounds? Is conceptual poetry dead? Alec Wilkinson for The New Yorker and Cathy Park Hong for The New Republic offer their opinions.
Chinese Publishing
The Guardian profiles the proliferation of Chinese self-publishing websites. Could this be the future of publishing?
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New James Ellroy Story
Legendary crime writer James Ellroy has a new story out for sale in ebookstores: “Shakedown“.
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Writing About Suicide
Recommended reading: Philip Connors, whose memoir All the Wrong Places was included in our 2015 Book Preview, writes for the New Yorker about his brother’s death and the problems with “cathartic” writing.
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