New Yorker darling Tessa Hadley has a new novel out this week, The London Train. Also out is the controversial oral history of ESPN, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, which reportedly offers up ample doses of insider gossip and bad behavior. And finally, there’s The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, in which contemporary journalism is explored in a graphic novel format. Here’s a taste.
Tuesday New Release Day: Hadley, ESPN, Gladstone
A Complete Reading
Recommended Reading: From The New Yorker, it's Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology: "When I’m writing a story, its world is thin, unsatisfactory, untrue, until I start to find my way to those details, those 'small cultural signifiers.' As these accumulate on the page, the life in the piece thickens, the details breed, and the story begins to stir."
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Clashing Titans, old and new fashioned
Virginia Heffernan weighs in on the whole Wikipedia v. Philip Roth thing, brilliantly pitting "Anglo-American Great Man media empires" against "Polyglot Open-Source new media".
Poets Talk Back
Over at The Margins, Franny Choi, Ali Eteraz, and others respond to Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker poem, “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” As they put it, “Trillin is part of the ‘we’ in his poem but it’s clear that Chinese and Chinese American people are not. Instead, invoking Yellow Peril fears, Trillin speaks of the threat food from ‘more provinces’ while ignoring that those provinces are home to people, too.”
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McSweeney’s Column Contest
McSweeney's is accepting entries for their 3rd Annual Column Contest.
Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that "everything is tentative" at this time.
Speaking like Shakespeare
"What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare?" A father and son team are working to answer this question, recover Shakespeare's original pronunciation and perform his plays in the new-old style, and lest this sound like a silly exercise in scholarship consider that "two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets.... have rhymes that only work in [Old Pronunciation]."