Does the central, eponymous poem from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire stand on its own as a literary masterwork?
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”
Goosebumps Turns Twenty
Two decades after the release of the first Goosebumps book, Jen Doll checks in with R. L. Stine.
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Back in the High Life Again
Self-styled music critic Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, certainly had a lot to say about 80s mainstays like Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News. Over at The New Inquiry, J. Temperance argues for Steve Winwood as Patrick Bateman’s musical doppelgänger. Go ahead and take a look at this essay by Bill Morris of The Millions on The Canyons, a film for which Ellis wrote the screenplay.
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R. L. Stine Revisited
Eat Cheese and Die Happy!: an R. L. Stine title for my life. See more at McSweeney’s by Amanda Rosenberg.
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The Intellectuals
A look at the writer Nelson Algren, a.k.a. Lewis Brogan in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins.
Helping Hands
In the late seventies, when Susan Sontag was recovering from cancer, she hired an assistant to help her catch up on correspondence. Her editor recommended Sigrid Nunez, who began working for Sontag and ended up moving in with her. Nunez now recalls the experience with a mixture of gratitude and pain. In Dissent, a look at the economy of creative assistants.
“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
Have you ever wanted to take a road trip like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise? You can now. Gregor Weichbrodt used Google Maps to write directions for On The Road’s famous 7,527-mile drive. Choose your companions wisely, so you don’t get stuck with dysentery in Mexico.
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Gibson Girl
“By then she was bobbing her hair, and after her visit to Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the campus newspaper noted that the percentage of bobbed hairstyles among students shot up from 9 percent to 63 percent.” Edna Saint Vincent Millay, trendsetter.
The Most Accurate Science Fiction
While the best science fiction is a matter of taste, six scientists weigh in on the most accurate science fiction in their diverse fields, for io9.