In a Grantland interview with Rafe Bartholomew, Don DeLillo talks Underworld, baseball, and Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”
Bartholomew, DeLillo, Thomson
The AOL Layoff Carnage
At The Awl, a former AOL freelancer reports on the layoff carnage there in the wake of the HuffPo acquisition.
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Proto-Stalin
The world isn’t exactly wanting for character studies of Captain Ahab, but Chris Power manages to come up with a novel analysis of the character in this essay about the Moby-Dick antagonist. In Power’s telling, Ahab was valuable in part for what he told us about the 20th century -- namely, he foreshadowed the dictators and despots to come. You could also read Hester Blum’s contribution to this essay about the best American novels.
From Musician to Collagist
Musician and Super Bowl bird-flipper M.I.A. will release a 192-page hardcover book this October. M.I.A. will be "an autobiographical monograph in collages." P.S. How good is the "Bad Girls" video?
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William Blake(s)
Now Is Not the Time for Realism
Recommended Listening: Margaret Atwood on her new novel – one of the most anticipated books of 2015, and the fall of realistic fiction. As she explains it, “when there's perceived instability that's happening you can't write [a so-called realistic] novel and have people believe it."
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Not for Everyone
Ultra-niche magazines operate a bit differently than their larger and more mainstream cousins. Magazines like Donkey Talk, which caters exclusively to donkey hobbyists, aim for tiny audiences of a few hundred to a few thousand readers. They also cultivate their own jargon -- one magazine, The Mountain Astrologer, tosses the word “quincunx” around as casually as “email.”
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Best Original Cave Painting
We cover a decent number of literary awards here at The Millions, but we, like most magazines, have a tendency to focus on the present. At the LARB, Andrew Nicholls makes up for this by recounting the very first book awards, in which Mooluu’s “The Beast Attacked” goes head-to-head with Kurtan the Elder’s “Why Half My Face is Missing.” You could also read our own Mark O’Connell on why we care about literary prizes to begin with.
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Nein, nein!
Bad news, guys: the longest word in the German language is officially no longer a word.