How do you spell t-r-a-c-t-i-o-n? Our recent stories about the spreading Occupy Wall Street protests seem to be part of a trend. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that the protests accounted for only 7% of coverage in all news media nationwide in the past week — but that’s a four-fold increase from the week before.
OWS and the Press
Pork Problem
“First, catch your pig.” This is the beginning of Harper Lee’s recipe for cornbread, but it’s not the first time pork has preoccupied her writing. At The Paris Review, Sadie Stein examines the use of ham in Lee’s fiction.
On Children’s Lit
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The High Price
Recommended Reading: On Patricia Highsmith, Carol, and being the queer daughter of a queer mother: “I am doomed to die an ugly death or at least to be separated from my partner, probably violently. So is my queer mother and my partner and my cousin and many of my friends. We are all doomed, it seems, because this is the only story American media tells about queer women.”
Hidden Treasures
What if a treasure hunt in a book crossed over into the real world? Author Kit Williams buried a prize and left clues to its location in his novel, Masquerade. The search drove England crazy. Our own Hannah Gersen maps the imaginary in her essay about how authors organize their manuscripts.
Reading is a Kafkaesque Experience
In the latest entry in By Heart, the Atlantic series we’ve written about a few times, Ben Marcus (who recently came out with a new book) reflects on the true meaning of the word “Kafkaesque.” Marcus interprets Kafka’s “A Message from the Emperor” as a parable about the difficulty of real human connection. (Related: there’s now a Kafka video game.)
Tuesday New Release Day: Lethem; Lasdun; Khalifa; Prose; Correa; Macy; Hajdu; Chung
New this week: A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem; The Fall Guy by James Lasdun; No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa; Mister Monkey by Francine Prose; The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa; Truevine by Beth Macy; Love for Sale by David Hajdu; and The Loved Ones by our own Sonya Chung. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview.
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DFW, Viking Enthusiast
The New Yorker gives us a glimpse of the David Foster Wallace papers just sold to the Harry Ransom Center, including the youthful “Viking Poem.”
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