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
“Suddenly, a pale fire sprung from his palms.”
Like Game of Thrones? Love reading stories about the Brooklyn literary scene? Well, guess what — the good-humored editors at Full Stop found a way to combine the two.
“Murakami, who is nothing if not ambitious, has created a kind of alternative world, a mirror of ours, reversed.”
Though coverage of Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84 has been ubiquitous this month (appearing on this site as well), it is always worthwhile to read the inimitable New York Review of Books‘ take on such things.
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Influential Books
The Library of Congress has published an updated list of the most influential books in America after hearing responses from the public.
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The Darker Side of Jack London
“The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs.” Johann Hari reviews James L. Haley’s new biography Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, at Slate.
Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
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“Which Poet Are You?”
Does love “crack [your] sternum open” or is love like the “mystery of water and a star?” Is your soul “an empty carousel at sunset?” Are you an only child? I ask because these – along with several other questions – will help Farrar, Straus, and Giroux determine once and for all: “Which Poet Are You?”
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