The Guardian asked a bunch of authors, including Hilary Mantel, Geoff Dyer, and Ian Rankin, which books they “regularly reread and which novels they are desperate to unlock the secrets of.” Check out John Banville’s abiding fixation on the works on F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Authors Upon Authors
On Rejection
A few weeks back, Indiana Review editor Joe Hiland shared his list of stories he most often rejects. Now, Michael Mlekoday, the publication’s poetry editor, does likewise with his list of “Five Marks of Oft-Rejected Poems.” Meanwhile, Missouri Review editor Michael Nye has some qualms about this type of post.
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Ultra-Unreal Reality
Does modern China need its own literary sub-genre? On trying to understand China’s “ultra-unreal” reality: “If Magic Realism was the way in which Latin American authors presented their view of their reality, then Ultra-Unreal Realism should be our name for the literature through which the Chinese regard their reality. The Chinese word ‘chaohuan’ (ultra-unreal) is something of a play on the word ‘mohuan’ (magic), as in ‘mohuan xianshizhuyi’ (magic realism)— ‘mohuan’ is ‘magical unreal,’ and ‘chaohuan’ is ‘surpassing the unreal.’”
MFA Opinions
Nearly everyone has an opinion about MFA programs, and Flavorwire has 27 pulled from writers and teachers, including our own Edan Lepucki whose full piece on “The MFA Debate” can be found here.
Nobel Streak Stays Alive for University Press
Last year we highlighted University of Nebraska Press among other small presses for the keeping in print otherwise little known future Nobel laureates. Today’s honoree Mario Vargas Llosa is quite well-known by comparison, but University of Nebraska Press has nonetheless (barely) run its Nobel streak to three straight years by way of Vargas Llosa’s inclusion in the press’ soccer writing anthology, The Global Game: Writers on Soccer.
Smaller Items
Last week I asked “What about J.T. Leroy?” I was wondering when the Leroy hoaxers were going to come forward. Now, one of them has. Warren St. John of the New York Times got Geoffrey Knoop to come clean on the record. Knoop also said that he didn’t think Laura Albert, who wrote the Leroy books, would ever come forward: “‘For her, it’s very personal,’ he said. ‘It’s not a hoax. It’s a part of her.'”Meanwhile, PopMatters put together a special section about Leroy and James Frey. I enjoyed The Rake’s related comments on why Frey can’t hold a candle to Charles Bukowski.I saw Brokeback Mountain a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. In an excerpt from Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, Annie Proulx describes what it was like seeing her story on the screen: “I felt that, just as the ancient Egyptians had removed a corpse’s brain through the nostril with a slender hook before mummification, the cast and crew of this film, from the director down, had gotten into my mind and pulled out images.” (via Maud)This Boston Globe column articulates quite precisely how I feel about the strife surrounding the cartoons of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.
Kandy Kakes and Pathologies
Is anyone else hungry, now? Caution: this review of Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine from The New Inquiry is a real appetite inducer.
Translators at Work
Clarice Lispector’s translator and Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson interviews Elena Ferrante’s English-language translator Ann Goldstein about private identities and the final Neapolitan novel.
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Diving Into the Wreck
It’s time for a game of critic versus critic: at the Nation and the Huffington Post, respectively, Ange Mlinko and Carol Muske-Dukes consider and reconsider the poetry of Adrienne Rich.
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