Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
Appearing Elsewhere
An Ashtray Instead of a Computer
FSG's outstanding Work in Progress series drops in on the offices of Lapham's Quarterly founder Lewis Lapham.
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Watkins’s Romantic Sublime
“Too vast for human comprehension, yet at the same time a tabula rasa for each fragile individual’s desires, it’s a classic example of the Romantic sublime, as mesmerising as it is deadly.” The Guardian reviews Year in Reading Alumnus Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus. Compare and contrast with our review of the novel.
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Great Feats
You may have not known there’s a national arm wrestling championship. Joshua Davis found out when he saw an eye-catching flyer. When he found himself drafted onto Team USA, he turned the experience into his first big magazine piece. At The Rumpus, an interview with the author of Spare Parts.
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Kunzru Reads at WORD
On Thursday, March 22nd at 7pm, Hari Kunzru will visit WORD bookstore at 126 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY for an event co-hosted by The Millions. Visit the WORD website for further details and RSVP. See you there!
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All Hail King Brody
Damian Lewis is going from being a traitor of a country to running one. He will star as Henry VIII in the BBC's adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Mark Rylance will play Thomas Cromwell (though previously he's played another role in the court, Sir Thomas Boleyn.)
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The Desert Oracle Gives You the Desert
Pacific Standards profiles Ken Layne who quietly started the popular quarterly literary magazine, Desert Oracle for a town of 8,000 people. Now it has gained far more readers than that as it highlights works related to the American desert. "The reason that the Oracle works is that it's always trying to elicit that feeling, the awe and wonder that the desert reveals to you when you listen hard enough. Layne believes it's not an accident that religious awakenings, UFO sightings, walkabouts, and other revelations occur in the desert. It's a consequence of solitude, stark beauty, and the tenacious life that only the desert has."
Family Tree
"Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself...many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief," Virginia Woolf wrote of her father for his biographer, but who was Leslie Stephen, exactly?
The larger question here should be, what kind of impact is this consolidation of writers into one burrough of one city having on American lit as a whole? I.e., is this a good thing?
Personally the last thing I want to read right now is another New York novel by the editor of some Brooklyn lit mag published by a friend of his Park Slope neighbor. Yet these keep popping up.
I’d argue this sort of insularity diminshes quality – the focus seeming to be living a hip writerly life in a hip writerly neighborhood instead of, you know, writing a damn good book. Let’s not forget this Brooklyn “factory” (and “factory” is quite appropriate) spit out a book called “All The Sad Young Literary Men”. How anyone would want to read a novel with that insufferable title is beyond me.
I’m not saying everything coming out of NYC these days is bad. Not true. But there’s much more interesting work being published in Chicago (Dalkey, U. Chicago) and Minneapolis (Graywolf, Milkweed, Coffee House), just to name
two. And I don’t think it would hurt for all these NY-based writers, editors, publishers, etc. to get the hell out of Brooklyn once in a while and see how the rest of our grand huge weird country lives.
Heh:
http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/the-economist-on-brooklyns-literary-renaissance