It almost sounds too terrifying to be true. Your book is reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and he opens with: “This is an extraordinarily irritating book” (and it gets worse from there, and deservedly so). It happened to David Mamet and his new book The Secret Knowledge.
Hitchens on Mamet
Calling All Foer-Besotted 10-Year-Olds
Spotted on the streets of New York: a casting call for a “10-13 year old Caucasian male” to play protagonist Oskar Schell in Stephen Daldry‘s upcoming film adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Notable Goyim Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are attached to the project, as Oskar’s parents.
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More like Readit, ha ha.
Since writing a plea for a YouTube lit category in Fiction Circus (which we discussed on our Tumblr), Miracle Jones has built a Reddit thread for literary videos.
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No Se Habla
Back in March, I pointed readers to an interview with Minae Mizumura, whose recent book, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, makes a case against the dominance of the English language in the modern age. Now, at Full-Stop, Sho Spaeth reviews the book. Sample quote: “She has a curious blindness to what may be her greatest offense of all to the prevailing attitude of our age: a naive rejection of the idea that novels, and their novelists, exist merely to entertain.”
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“Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.”
Proclaiming the death of the book has been in vogue nearly as long as the book itself. Leah Price presents a short history of our pessimism for the future of the written word.
Too Much Imagining
Jonah Lehrer has resigned from his staff position at the New Yorker, after Tablet Magazine revealed he had fabricated quotes–from Bob Dylan, no less!–in his bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, which since has been pulled from the market. Michael C. Moynihan, the journalist who discovered the deception, was interviewed by the Observer, saying he felt “horrible” watching vitriolic reactions pour in. Previously the book saw critique for its loose science in both The New Republic and The Millions.
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Pynchon Defends McEwan
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Like Cream
“I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.” An excerpt from Lydia Davis‘s foreword to Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories is now online.
Perhaps Mamet is writing some sly parody of right-winger thinking and we’re just not smart enough to get the joke. That’s what I’d like to believe.
That’s the thing about good parodies of crazy: You can’t tell them from the original. I kind of hope you’re right, Bat of Moon.
Makes me grateful to be invisible.
No, Mamet is a scary person. All of his non-fiction is deeply disturbing.