Two literary titans in need of no introduction: Martin Amis reviews Don DeLillo‘s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories.
Amis on DeLillo
Carmen Maria Machado on the Consequences of Banning Books
Those who seek to ban my book are trying to exploit fear—about the realities that books like mine expose, fear about desire and sex and love—and distort it into something ugly, in an attempt to wish away queer experiences.
●
●
●
ICYMI
“People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders.” Year in Reading alum Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts, speaks to The Guardian about gender, family, and her personal life.
●
●
Yossarian Wins
At The Paris Review Daily, Katherine Hill (whose debut novel came out two weeks ago) comes up with a bracket of ideal literary friends. (Understandably, Portnoy beat out Humbert Humbert.)
●
●
Elif Batuman on Reading the Russians
Essayist and Russian literature scholar Elif Batuman in an interview with the Boston Globe on how the Russians get the combination of “funny and sad” better than the Germans, the English, or the French.
●
●
Dear and Dirty
Haven’t read our own Mark O’Connell’s great new essay at Slate? To mark the hundredth anniversary of Dubliners, Mark paid a visit to the James Joyce House, which led him to reflect on life in his native city. “If you live in Dublin, if you are yourself a Dubliner,” he writes, “no matter how many times you read the book, it will always reveal something profound and essential and unrealized about the city and its people.”
●
●
Blame the Superheroes
Don’t expect to hear from Alan Moore anytime soon. He is withdrawing from public life after accusations that his comics include racist characters and too much sexual violence toward women according to an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid. He also took the opportunity to disparage society’s obsession with superheroes, which probably won’t win him any more fans. “To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence.”
●
●
Our New Mantra
“So Be It! See To It!” So you may have already seen this on the literary internet earlier this year, but today’s Friday, and we needed a little infusion of life: enter Octavia Butler‘s amazingly awesome note to self (via the also amazing and awesome Rose Eveleth).
●
●