Imagine a Venn Diagram with two circles: Paul Murray and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Now imagine its intersection. Did you think of Axl Rose? You should’ve.
I Guess There Could Be More Intersections, Too
“How an ordinary Asian fell in love with The Smiths”
You may not expect much from a write-up about The Smiths' new collected box set, Complete, but that's about to change. In a phenomenal piece on the relationship between racial (in particular Asian) otherness and the UK band's music, Sukhdev Sandhu explains how Morrissey's "lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood."
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I Wrote, Yes, But Not That
Uh-oh: Hemingway may not have written his famous six-word story.
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Riverhead Heads
Riverhead Books makes an amusing pun in a new fundraiser in which individuals can purchase 3D heads of Riverhead authors — Marlon James, Khaled Hosseini, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lauren Groff, Nick Hornby and more. Proceeds will go to the nonprofit Libraries Without Borders, which supports migrant and refugee populations in Europe by making books and learning materials accessible in multiple languages.
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A subject “simply too controversial for the university”
As noted on Arts & Letters Daily, Yale's decision to shutter its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism raises the question, "Where does scholarship end and advocacy begin?"
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It Is Shark Week, After All
Bret Easton Ellis is collaborating with Taxi Driver director Paul Schrader on a new "psychological horror" movie about sharks. Coincidentally, HTMLGiant's Blake Butler just revisited Ellis' infamous novel American Psycho.
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Your Tacit Approval
“I hate to break it to you, folks, but RTs are implied endorsements. Forwarding an article by e-mail without explaining why you are passing it on implies that you agree with it (and that you are someone who likes to waste my time). RTing something without comment means the same thing.” Uh oh.
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The Great Indie Bookstore Tour
In 2013, poet and bookseller Alan Brandsted approached Seattle’s Wave Books with an interesting proposal: in exchange for a box of galleys and gas money, he would embark on a cross-country mission to “spread the good word of poetry to independent bookstores.” What followed is the ongoing Indie Bookstore Tour, which is being chronicled on Tumblr (hashtag “#wavepoetrytour”) and Instagram. (First Tumblr post can be found here.)
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