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
Book Learnin’
“This is the first time that the college has embarked on such a robust process for measuring Core Educational Competency In Reading Things In Books And Writing About Them, and we really can’t do it without your mandated participation. We have devised this rubric in consultation with the Office of Institutional Research About the Institution, which tirelessly gathers data and then enters it into spreadsheets. Please see their Statement of Very Worthy Goals in attachment 6.”
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We’re Not In the Establishment. Right, Geoff?
In The Guardian, Geoff Dyer talks about about the literary establishment and how, in particular, "unspoken assumption that [it] – whatever it is – is a bad thing."
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“Fight Club 4 Kids”
There are some charming children's books, some really bad ones, and then finally there's Fight Club 4 Kids, which somehow manages to be both. Watch Chuck Palahniuk read the (fake) children's version of his classic novel in this video from Mashable.
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Truck Driver From the Waist Down
Recommended Reading: On the forgotten journalism of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee's forays into journalism included a 1,200-word profile of Officer Dewey, the lead investigator in the series of murders which were the focus of Truman Capote's seminal In Cold Blood, and another short profile of Capote himself for the newsletter of a Book of the Month Club which had selected In Cold Blood as its monthly read -- seriously.
Big Budget Brontë Biopic in the Works
All three Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne – will be the subject of a new “blockbuster biopic,” reports Telegraph & Argus. An announcement about the cast and crew will be made on April 21, 2016 – the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth date – but early speculation indicates that Harry Potter star Rupert Grint may play Branwell.
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