Saul Bellow on being Jewish in America, and Lorin Stein, in an interview, discusses contemporary Jewish writers.
Jewish America
Bibliophilic Crack
In the spring of 2006, John Unsworth taught a graduate seminar on "Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers." It led to one of history's finest class projects--a browsable database of bestsellers, 337 in all. As with any bestseller lists, you'll find a range of titles, everything from Thomas Wolfe to Tom Clancy, but click through and find that each entry includes an extremely detailed description of the book's history (these were compiled by graduate students, after all); a mini-essay on its reception; images of covers, page layouts, and even some ads; and more. It is, in short, bibliophilic crack. (Thanks Craig)
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On the Adjunct
McSweeney’s has a few classic college movies updated for the adjunct era. Spoiler Alert: Good Will Hunting has a very different ending.
Longshot Magazine
Longshot is an online magazine with quite an interesting concept: "Over a 48 hour period from noon July 29, 2011, through noon July 31, 2011, thousands of writers, editors, artists, photographers, programmers, videographers, and other creatives from all around the world will come together via the Internet to make a magazine from start to finish." This issue's theme is "Debt" and you can follow its progress via Tumblr.
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Stanford Online Courses
Stanford's next round of free online courses includes Cryptography, Human-Computer Interaction, and Game Theory.
You’ve Probably Never Heard of Him
Is Mark SaFranko the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of? We don’t know, but 3:AM Magazine makes a strong case in this interview with the author who they call an heir to Charles Bukowski and John Fante. Now you’ve heard of him, at least.
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O Canada
We celebrated Canada Day a bit early here yesterday with the news that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature and our review of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam. So what is Canadian literature exactly? Atwood offered her definition for The Daily Beast: "It’s too multiple [to give a concise definition], but let us say that the point of view (if the writer is not pretending to be American, which they often are) is never that of someone who feels that their country is an imperial power. Because, in fact, Canada is not an imperial power." You can also see The Handmaid's Tale at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet next week.
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Step Aside Shakes
Hold on to your starched collars: In breaking Shakespeare news, Oxford University Press announced that in its new edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe will receive credit as co-author on the Henriad plays. And if you're really tired of Will getting all the credit, you'll enjoy our recent piece about the surge of interest in Ben Jonson, who's basically the Third Tenor to their more famous voices.
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