Mark McGurl author of the book that got everyone talking about MFA programs, The Program Era, mounts a spirited defense against Elif Batuman’s much discussed review of the book. Among his ripostes: “One can be all for the deflation of liberal pieties without being a gleeful ignoramus about it, as though literary journalism needs its own Ann Coulter.” Zing!
Fighting Words
More BEA coverage
●
●
What Happens When It Becomes Self-Aware?
An NYU graduate student has created the BurritoBot, a robot capable of “printing” edible bean burritos, and you can control the machine with your iPhone. Humanity, we have peaked.
Read Yourself Civilized
In the latest issue of The Boston Review, Elaine Scarry reviews Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that literature, by bolstering man's empathy, has lead to huge reductions in worldwide violence, a thesis that sounds dangerously close to the absurd pop-science of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.
●
●
Perfectly Inexplicable
Last week, I wrote about Kathryn Schulz’s innovative interview with David Mitchell, which took place on a walk along the Irish coastline. Now, in a nice complement to our own review from today, Pico Iyer reviews the author’s latest. Sample quote: “A perfectly matter-of-fact, unvarnished evocation of how regular folks speak, married to a take-no-prisoners fascination with all that we can’t explain.” Our review of The Bone Clocks was published today.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Gaiman; Baxter; Morris; Hannah; Swanson; Cooper; Handler; Boyne; Duchovny; Link
Out this week: Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman; There’s Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter; Bon Appétempt by Amelia Morris; The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah; The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson; The Marauders by Tom Cooper; We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler; A History of Loneliness by John Boyne; Holy Cow by The X-Files star David Duchovny; and Get in Trouble by Kelly Link. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
On Velvet
Recommended Listening: Mary Gaitskill talks about her new book The Mare with host David Naimon. Pair with Chelsea Voulgares’s Millions interview with the author.
●
●
e-Forgetting
Dwight Garner's New York Times piece last weekend, "The Way We Read Now," was a joy, but I wonder how his opinions might've changed had he read this Time article first. Apparently some scientists speculate it's harder to remember digital content than print.
●
●
7 reasons not to write a novel
Javier Marías cogently summarizes all the reasons to stop writing novels immediately, and adds only one reason to write them anyway: "Fiction is the most bearable of worlds." We reviewed The Infatuations, one of his own twelve works (to date), last year.
●
●