Our own Mark O’Connell likens James Joyce’s grandson to a “highbrow Darth Vader.”
A Disturbance in the Force of the Joyce Estate
Memories of Home
For NPR, Joyce Carol Oates talks about her childhood home and how it’s influenced her as a person and a writer. Pair with Brittani Sonnenberg’s Millions essay on finding a home as a writer.
●
●
An Objective Look at Seven M.F.A. Rejections
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, an objective look at seven M.F.A. program rejections compared to other historic rejections.
●
●
Not notable?!
A Nicholson Baker essay on Wikipedia and its pleasures (and its frustrations), has resurfaced in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
●
●
One Yakuza Group Starts its Own Magazine
Yamaguchi-gumi Shinpo, the largest Yakuza faction, has decided to start its own magazine focused on “haiku poetry, articles on the innocent pursuit of angling and entreaties to its readers to perform good works” among other things. Related: recently photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai.
●
●
●
●
Ahead of His Time
“Adrianne [Lobel] suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are ‘of the same sex, and they love each other,’ she told me. ‘It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.’ In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, [Arnold] Lobel came out to his family as gay.” On love and Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad.
●
●
Turkish … Delight?
C.S. Lewis’s greatest fiction of all time was convincing American children that turkish delight was going to taste good. Here are a couple pieces on food and writing to sate your unjustly titillated appetite.
●
●