In April, the University Press of Mississippi will add a volume on David Foster Wallace to its Literary Conversations Series. A taste of the interviews contained within can be found at Dalkey.
David Foster Wallace in Coversation
Letters to Gandhi
Maria Popova shares Tolstoy’s forgotten letters to Gandhi, later published as A Letter to Hindu. “Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
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The Historic Multitudes of bell hooks
For The New York Times, Min Jin Lee recounts the paradigm-shifting experience of reading bell hooks as a sophomore at Yale.
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On “Reading to Impress Yourself”
Rebecca Mead writes for The New Yorker about “The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself” and the false divide between books “we read because we want to and those we read because we have to.”
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Ulysses in Covers
Fin
Shakespeare is required reading for the would-be literary scholar, yet with so many articles, books and monographs on the Bard in circulation, it might be time to ask: have English professors finally said all there is to say?
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Murakami on the Stage
A surreal theater production of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival in July. Ian Buruma writes for the NYRB about the marriage of tradition and modernity, and Western and Eastern references in the play. As he puts it, “even without traditional references, the production—perhaps more than Murakami’s novel—is still unmistakably Japanese: stylized, poetic, comical, violent, full of spectacular effects, and often exquisitely beautiful to look at. The setting jumps at lightning speed from a bus station, to a library, to a sleazy bar area. Various characters emerge and disappear, like memories or scenes from a dream, in an assortment of moving transparent boxes.”