Filmmaker/novelist John Sayles has written a freaking huge novel revisiting the historical moment of Ragtime and Against the Day. Published by McSweeney’s (“We Print Enormous Books”), it’s getting strong pre-pub reviews.
Again, I Ask You: Is Big Back?
Doing the Academic Stuff
“You’re never going to write well for a wider audience if you think it’s less worthwhile, less difficult than doing the academic stuff.” Jo Livingstone interviews David Wolf, commissioning editor of The Guardian Long Read.
●
●
Borders Leftovers
At The Daily Beast, our own Bill Morris goes to a Borders store closing due to bankruptcy to see what remains once all the good books have been picked clean.
●
●
Captain Pentagon
"In the 1970s it circulated among Left Bank intellectuals, including Sartre and Bernard-Henri Lévy, as an aid to productive writing. In 1981 it was listed as a controlled substance in the US and in 1986, after it was scheduled under the WHO Convention on Psychotropic Substances, it was removed from prescription sale." The London Review of Books reviews two histories about the role of drugs in the fighting of wars, Blitzed: Drugs In the Third Reich by Norman Ohler and Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare by Łukasz Kamieński Hurst. Both pay particular attention to Captagon (the name a portmanteau of "captain" and "pentagon"), a pharmaceutical that has become common throughout Eastern Europe, the Gulf States, India, and China, and by 2014 "had become a significant source of funding for all sides in Syria’s civil war."
●
●
“Reflections on Gandhi”
Looks like George Orwell's birthplace is going to be turned into a memorial - but to a different writer and activist. The land will be dedicated to Gandhi, who Orwell wrote about in his 1949 essay "Reflections on Gandhi."
●
●
The Paris Review Redux
"I hope they also love that experience of surprise and delight and really engaging stories in the fiction sense, but also in the writers at work sense and in the poetic sense." A Vanity Fair interview with Emily Nemens, The Paris Review's new editor. And here's a list of 20 reasons you should absolutely be reading literary magazines.