Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Neil Strauss warns readers about the “insidious evils of ‘like’ culture.” Was he in the audience for Jonathan Franzen‘s May 21 commencement speech at Kenyon College?
‘Dislike’ Button Forthcoming
In Defense of Quiet Books
“The best thing I ever do for my writing is to take a walk alone in the woods behind our house. Nothing else gets my writing juices flowing so well. And yes, I think that I absolutely need more quiet in our current fractured world.” For Poets & Writers, novelist Leesa Cross-Smith interviewed fellow writer Silas House about quiet books and the importance of nature in the writing process. Pair with: our own Emily St. John Mandel on the pleasures of quiet books.
Dubliners, 100 Years Later
At Flavorwire Jonathan Sturgeon considers what we’ve learned from Dubliners in the hundred years since it was first published and argues that “when it comes to realism, Dubliners, more than even Chekhov’s short fiction, is the model we routinely fail to live up to.” Sturgeon’s reflections on Joyce‘s free indirect discourse pair well with Jonathan Russell Clark‘s Millions essay on close writing, and his essay isn’t completely without hope: he concludes with a few books that, “on the surface, look nothing like Dubliners, but, in spirit… show that Joyce’s book still lives 100 years on.”
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Not Exactly a Science
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reads an essay in Biographia Literaria, a book by Samuel Coleridge now available for free in the Kindle store.
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Big Papa Country
Brad Leithauser on being from “Hemingway country,” and Matt Pearce, on the impossibility of tweeting from there.