In her scathing, yet utterly necessary, review of Steve Jobs and its subject, Maureen Tkacik writes that “with any luck future generations will saddle Steve Jobs, the brand, with the blemish of all the jobs (small ‘j’) a once-great nation relinquished because of brand-name billionaires like Jobs.”
The Mythology of Jobs
Miranda July’s Somebody
Miranda July – whose new novel, The First Bad Man, is due in January – has developed a smartphone app that “allows one person to deliver a message to another.” The kicker? Someone other than you will deliver the message verbally and in person. (Sounds like she’s probably due before Congress once again.)
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Simic on Strand
"By now, you are probably asking yourself, Did these two ever talk about anything serious? Of course, we did. We talked about how writing a poem is no different from taking out a frying pan and concocting a dish out of the ingredients available in the house, how in poetry, as in cooking, it’s all a matter of subtle little touches that come from long experience or are the result of sudden inspiration." Charles Simic writes movingly about his friend, the late poet Mark Strand, and their various schemes, from buying palazzos to founding a gastronomic poetry movement, for The New York Review of Books.
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Rooster Starter Kit
The Morning News Tournament of Books is around the corner (less than two weeks away, in fact) and readers can now download the bracket (pdf), print it out, and start scribbling in their picks. Along with the bracket, Andrew Seal offers up an array of intriguing statistics from past tournaments. So, now that you can make an educated guess, Who do you think is going to win this year?
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Agent of Chaos
Recommended Reading: Daniel Marc Janes on the fictional namesakes of London’s mayor.
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The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Turns 75
The Iowa Writers' Workshop turns 75 this year. To celebrate, a number of alumni are writing essays on their experiences for various blogs (as well as ours!) as part of The 75th Project. At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kevin Brockmeier has comprised "A Chronological List of Statements People Made to Me at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, 1995-1997." Additionally, Joyelle McSweeney has a piece on n+1's website entitled "Iowa Occult: a Mütter Pedagogy; Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Vomit Art."
Tuesday New Release Day: Pollan, Sedaris, Stelter, Currey, Thompson, Stothard, Rutherfurd, Wecker, Riley
The headliners this week are on the non-fiction side: Michael Pollan's Cooked and Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris. Also new in non-fiction: Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV by the Times' Brian Stelter and Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. In fiction: The Humanity Project by Jean Thompson, The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard, Paris by Edward Rutherfurd, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope by Rhonda Riley.
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“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week's New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in "activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting."
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An Ashtray Instead of a Computer
FSG's outstanding Work in Progress series drops in on the offices of Lapham's Quarterly founder Lewis Lapham.
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