Catching you up to speed with two recent literary controversies: 1) Poets & Writers‘ MFA rankings kerfuffle gets a climactic and eloquent summary from The Missouri Review‘s Michael Nye. 2) In response to her Salon article, “How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant,” Victor LaValle has some fightin’ words for Laura Miller.
“This recent column was just bonkers”
“Life is not personal.”
"This notion of investigation offers an alternative to confession. Its goal isn’t sympathy or forgiveness. Life is not personal. Life is evidence. It’s fodder for argument. To put the “I” to work this way invites a different intimacy—not voyeuristic communion but collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives." Year in Reading alum Leslie Jamison writes for The Atlantic about alternatives to the confessional mode in literature.
On Negative Book Reviews
"An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good." In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the "enfeebling of literary criticism." From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.
Yes, Strange
Just when you thought I wouldn't make you sad about Alan Rickman again, here he is starring in a film adaptation of one of Samuel Beckett's short plays. In case you missed it last time, these recordings of Rickman reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy will surely generate some feelings.
“Publish for readers, not authors.”
OR Books recently announced a forthcoming book from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Meanwhile, OR’s publisher, Colin Robinson, shares ten ways to “save the publishing industry.”
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Can You Figure Out Dutch Ovens While You’re at It?
Is Scotch tape Scottish? The Paris Review asks a question that has to be asked.
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Saunders Meets DFW
Sometime Millions writer Frank Kovarik plumbs the connections between George Saunders' recent story in The New Yorker and David Foster Wallace's suicide.
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