It’s been one week since the “Friday Night Lights” finale aired on network television, and it seems as though the entire internet is grieving. Two Grantland pieces: an oral history and a tongue-in-cheek analysis; an opinion piece juxtaposing Peter Berg‘s low-rated drama against “Glee”‘s success; and now even The Paris Review has thrown its hat into the ring. All of this, of course, comes on the heels of our own Sonya Chung‘s piece last April.
Goodbye, Friday Night Lights
F-O-R-T-E
When spelling bees are so fun you think they might be your calling, it’s understandable that a serious loss might haunt you for quite some time.
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Renowned Cuban Poet Resigns from Nation’s Association of Writers and Artists
Rafael Alcides Perez, one of Cuba’s most renowned poets and public intellectuals, has resigned from the Association of Cuban Writers and Artists because of “government restrictions he is being subjected to,” reports the Havana Times. You can read some of his work (in Spanish) over here, here, and here.
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Voices in Asian-Anglophone Fiction
This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the "dispassionate first-person narrators" prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works. "Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian."
Tuesday New Release Day: Millhauser, Matar, Shakar, Fuller, Chez Panisse
Steven Millhauser's new collection We Others is out this week, as are Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance and Alex Shakar's Luminarium. Here at The Millions, Shakar recently offered the harrowing story of the publication of his first novel. Alexandra Fuller has a new memoir out. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. and foodies are celebrating with 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering.
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Au Revoir Archie
After 73 years, everyone's favorite redheaded comic book hero will be killed off. Archie Andrews will die in a July issue of the Life With Archie comic. "He dies saving the life of a friend and does it in his usual selfless way," Archie Comics CEO Jon Goldwater said. That won't be the last you'll see of Archie, though, because Lena Dunham will write a few issues in one of Archie's other comic incarnations.
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Writing Literary Twitter
"Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems and essays, the books we sell, the magazines we edit: all this output, this paper expelled out to the world, the screens we invade with our narratives, it all matters to us. But does it matter to everyone else?" mensah demary writes about the good, the bad, and the slightly neurotic of being a writer on Twitter for Electric Literature.
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Of Mice and Megabytes
Although Of Mice and Men is an iconic novella about the Great Depression, could it be set in another era? At McSweeney's, Thomas Scott imagines Lennie and George in Silicon Valley. "Well, we’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens and a 7,000 square-foot Hacienda with a little landing pad on the top deck for a helicopter."
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