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
Nabokov on Butterflies
Vladimir Nabokov, who lived a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies and a Harvard museum curator, has had his theory on butterfly evolution finally proved sixty-five years later. (Thanks, Kevin)
Russian Slapstick
“Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.” Ian Frazier writes about the strange humor of Daniil Kharms for the New York Review of Books.
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‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ Turns 50
Fifty years after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders reflects on the "guidebook to a place I desperately wanted to visit but never knew how to reach."
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Total Eclipse
“I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” Longreads invites us to revisit Annie Dillard‘s classic essay “Total Eclipse,” from her new collection, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.
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TransAtlantic Sneak Peek
The folks at Goodreads provide an exclusive sneak peek at Colum McCann’s forthcoming novel, TransAtlantic. The book, which will publish in June, was featured on our Great 2013 Book Preview a few months back.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Ever wonder what writing contests do with the money they earn from entrance fees? Poets & Writers has posted detailed 2011 budgets from three of the country’s most prestigious book prizes, collected as part of my piece in the May/June issue of the magazine on the economics of writing contests.
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An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
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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