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 Internet Is For
“Internet-centrism, then, treats ‘the Internet’ as an object that acts on society from outside, rather than a technological form that emerges from within a particular social and political situation.” The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Evgeny Morozov’s latest critique of the digital age, To Save Everything, Click Here.
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I Leave You My Daffodils
What was it like to grow up with Wordsworth or Coleridge as your dad? Hint: it was weird. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Daily Dose of Fiction
101 Words has an ongoing flash fiction series, featuring the works of four writers every Sunday. This week’s edition includes a story by our own Michael Bourne, originally published in Tin House.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Elkin; Febos; Cottom; Butler; Mehta; Buchanan; O’Connell
Out this week: Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin; Abandon Me by Melissa Febos; Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom; Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; No Other World by Rahul Mehta; Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan; and To Be a Machine by our own Mark O’Connell (who we interviewed recently). For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
iLRB
Well, there goes your Sunday. The London Review of Books has uploaded a whole batch of podcasts to iTunes. And they’re free!
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Grief and Memory
Humans have been covering paintings, windows, and mirrors after the passing of loved ones for generations. Why do we feel the need to close off our connection to the outside world when we are grieving? Colin Dickey writes about the social, literary, and religious connotations of grief and memory at Hazlitt. At The Millions, Lidia Yuknavitch writes about channeling her grief into art.
Shelf Life
“‘You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books,’ Susan Sontag told Sigrid Nunez.” The meaning of book shelves.
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