The field has been set for The Morning News‘ annual Tournament of Books. Who will emerge victorious this year? Will it be a DeWitt or a deWitt?
The Tournament of Books
Assemble
“From this bleak backdrop unspools West Of Sunset, Stewart O’Nan’s sparkling and frequently delightful fictionalized take on those years. It’s a setting that’s near impossible for culture buffs to resist; for a certain subset of nerd, this is a sort of literary Avengers, collecting Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker alongside O’Nan’s delicate and sensitive portrayals of Fitzgerald and wife Zelda, to say nothing of Humphrey Bogart and a cameo by Katharine Hepburn, eating soup.”
Multi-Talented Nick Cave
You have to be a little in awe of the multi-disciplinary artist. Musician Nick Cave, who made his screenwriting debut with The Proposition, talks to the New Yorkerabout his new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as the multi-media audio book version.
Translations of Loneliness
“In Rilke’s essay on Auguste Rodin, written in the same year, he describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals. And later on, in Rodin’s studio on the Rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique tiger that Rodin treasured: ‘There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand…. If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.’” Henri Cole on the poet and a place that inspired his work.
The Crisis of the Canon
“I don’t start with disorder; I start with the tradition. If you’re not trained in the tradition, then deconstruction means nothing.” On Derrida, Foucault, and the deconstructionist defense of the canon.
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Alas, Poor Everyone
Alone In the Most Beautiful Place
Recommended Reading: This essay from The Literary Hub on how Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea extended the limits of a feminism which was rooted in the work of Charlotte Brontë.
The Handmaid’s Tale on TV
The Handmaid’s Tale is making its series debut on Hulu with Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) starring as Offred. Get ready for Gilead.
I’ve only read three of the books (so far), but I *loved* The Sisters Brothers. So I think I’m going with deWitt on this one!