Imagine if Shakespeare had written Pulp Fiction? Or if LOLcats had written “The Waste Land“?
Im in ur wasteland
Ignore the Pornification
At Guernica, Kirsten O’Regan delves into labiaplasty, a “relatively unregulated, frequently botched” and scarily popular new surgery. The oddest (and saddest) thing she learns about the procedure? Apparently a lot of young mothers urge their daughters to do it.
Writerly Advice
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Oh Doctor
Recommended Reading: Frances Stonor Saunders on Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.
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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The Opposite of Homesick
“The legal protection the German government gave our American relationship is gone, now that we are back in America.” Alexander Chee on coming home from Leipzig with his partner.
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Veering Bogward
At The Rumpus, Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviews Dark Lies the Island, the new short story collection by the Irish writer Kevin Barry. Mitchell quotes a number of the book’s more interesting idioms and perceives “an impolitic decadence to how Barry couples his words.” (Related: we interviewed Barry a few weeks ago.)
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First Murakami Collection in Almost A Decade
Haruki Murakami will publish his first short story collection in nine years this spring. Men Without Women will feature five previously published stories (including the controversial “Drive My Car”) and one new story. The book comes out in Japan in April, but there is no word on when we’ll see an English translation.
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The Sounds of New York
“Learning to really listen to it and learning to kind of embrace it, rather than running away from it, was a very useful thing to do,” says Hari Kunzru of the sounds of New York City’s streets. The sirens, horns, and arguments are the inspiration for his new “multimedia book,” Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York. (Bonus: Kunzru has participated in our Year in Reading series two times in the past.)
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