Sometime Ph.D candidate, sometime actor, and ubiquitous lit blog all-star James Franco (henceforth known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) has begun filming an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in West Virginia, and I’m reminded of that line from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” — “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
There’s Franco in My McCarthy
The Grenadier
Recommended Reading: Leo Robson’s review of a new book of essays by Craig Raine.
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A Matter of Time
Does literature have to be timeless? Over at Electric Literature, Kevin Pickard debates pop culture references in novels. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on books about the near future.
Elena Ferrante Revealed
Elena Ferrante has revealed her true identity. At McSweeney’s. You could also read this piece on Ferrante’s “encompassing vision of human experience.”
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“My school was on fire.”
Recommended Reading: Everything being written by Delaney Nolan – the most recent example of which being “I Was a Teenage Arsonist.”
Kindle Wins Christmas?
Amazon announced that on Christmas day it sold more Kindle ebooks than regular books (and that the Kindle is not the site’s most popular gift ever). Chadwick Matlin outlines at The Big Money the reasons why the Christmas day surge in ebook sales don’t matter. The New York Times suggests each new version of the Kindle may be getting worse, and separately dubs 2010 the “Year of the Tablet.”
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Seducing, Conquering, Discovering
An heroic L Magazine contributor read all 1,597 pages of Jan Kjaerstad‘s Wergerland Trilogy (brought to you by our friends at Overlook and Open Letter) to bring you this review.
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