Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d type: A seersuckered Michael Lewis shows off his “man cave” for ValleyGirl.tv. You can skip ahead to 9:20 for the tour. (via)
Michael Lewis’ Man Cave
It’s the reader.
In his review of Ben Marcus‘s The Flame Alphabet for the LARB, Lee Konstantinou suggests that we have now moved well beyond the death of the author: “In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead.” When we interviewed Marcus earlier this year he did not seem particularly mournful. We also reviewed the novel.
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Out West
“At the outset, Nair is in Sierra Leone to keep tabs on his old friend and uses the occasion to practice a little freelance extortion, stealing unspecified multinational secrets on a flash drive and sending them back to his girlfriend in Amsterdam. The first 50 pages are like a Johnsonian take on Graham Greene’s humid morality-play potboilers. Nair keeps meeting shifty European acquaintances and distrusting everything they say.” John Lingan reviews Denis Johnson’s new novel.
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Like Etsy, But For Art
“We live in a time of image explosion, but without that network images are just content. There’s simply no possibility of a viral digital success—a ‘Call Me Maybe‘ of painting or photography—because a work only becomes successful upon its art world approbation.”
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DFW, ctd.
On Friday, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin opened up its holdings of The Pale King, DFW’s last novel (which our own Garth Risk Hallberg reviewed for New York Magazine). At Page-Turner, D.T. Max picks through the new papers.
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Idolizing Hemingway
Robert Roper wonders whether or not Ernest Hemingway‘s death has “eclipsed his work.” Elsewhere, Melville House wonders whether or not the FBI had something to do with it. The author’s influence is as apparent today as ever before, though perhaps it’s not his death that endures, but rather his perceived masculine mystique.
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Accounting For Taste
Accounting for taste: a Cambridge University psychologist has concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” (via Book Bench)
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“A signature strike leveled the florist’s”
“I’ve always referred to it as a troubled project in the sense that I’m trying to tell stories about people who not are here in a way to tell their own stories. I’m trying to speak about an environment I knew well, but I’m aware that I’m dealing with very dark material. I’m pointing out the irony of what we would wish for ourselves and what actually ends up happening.” Teju Cole on tweeting American drone strikes.
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And check out the Library of America editions! Perhaps the whole set.