December 15th. New York City. Mark your calendars. John Jeremiah Sullivan and Wells Tower discuss “the art of the essay in light of Sullivan’s new book, Pulphead.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan on Essays
This Side of Criticism
F. Scott Fitzgerald called himself “a moralist at heart,” which might be why Kathryn Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent.”
This Is Awesome
“We’ve often thought First Nations and indigenous students — if they don’t see themselves reflected.. how engaged they can be with the educational system?” The Huffington Post reports that a school board in southern Ontario is making a native-focused literature course mandatory after learning that those books “were more interesting and engaging to students than the classics.” The class curriculum includes As Long as the River Flows by James Bartleman, Green Grass, Running Water and Medicine River by Thomas King, the 7 Generations graphic novel series by David Alexander Robertson, and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese. (Story via Book Riot.)
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James McBride on Kurt Vonnegut
McBride recounts a once-in-a-lifetime lunch meeting with one of his longtime literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut.
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Walt Whitman: Bottled and Brewed
Bell's Brewery, in Kalamazoo Mich., is set to release a series of seven beers in tribute to Walt Whitman's famous poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
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“We see these wounded women everywhere”
The latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review features Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” one of the most popular essays from her new collection, The Empathy Exams, which was reviewed for The Millions this past week.
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