Christopher Hitchens’ final piece of writing has been published by Vanity Fair. It’s about Charles Dickens, and in particular the author’s “willingness to atone for his mistakes.”
Posthumous Hitch
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on "blandness" in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
●
●
Bad from Good
Sometimes good writers write very badly. As evidence, Literary Hub has collected samples of bad writing from the likes of Year in Reading alum Isaac Fitzgerald and Daniel Clowes, who we interviewed here.
●
●
Putting the Fiction in Nonfiction
While researching In Cold Blood, Truman Capote took pains to get the story right, so much so that the final product was, he claimed, “immacutely factual.” The tale of his labors is so well-known that Bennett Miller used it as the basis of his movie Capote. So when allegations surface that the author made deliberate errors, the story gets a little bit... awkward.
●
●
A Method to the Madness
All the world is about to become a stage. The Globe Theatre will be performing Hamlet in every country on Earth starting on April 23, 2014, Shakespeare's 450th birthday. The 205-nation tour should take two years. This is one of many Shakespearean anniversary celebrations including contemporary authors covering his classics.
●
●