The world’s great literature as comics and visuals. Though, as Steven Heller points out in The Atlantic, defining the canon is a contentious task, comics or no.
Canonical Comics
What Happened
Blackout, the recent memoir by Sarah Hepola, chronicles the author’s long struggle with reckless drinking. The title references the total loss of memory she experienced after some of her worst benders. At The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwin talks with Hepola about her book, amnesia and the nature of memory.
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“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Ben Lerner has a story [subscription required] in this week's New Yorker that, like his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station, features a protagonist named The Author. The magazine interviewed Lerner about the invitation to blur his fiction with his autobiography. He says that his work in an exercise in "activating those questions in peculiar ways—but the questions, not the answers, are what strike me as interesting."
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Justin Taylor Threepeat
Did you dig “After Ellen,” Justin Taylor’s short story in The New Yorker? How about his interview for the Page-Turner blog? Yea? Well here’s even more: Joshua Cohen talks with The Gospel of Anarchy author for Jewish Book Council.
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Kindles Your Interest
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Much Ado About Burgers
Exhibit A: Joseph R Worthen’s ongoing series investigating the state of “Fast Food Hamburgers in the Southeastern United States.” (Parts Two and Three, too.) Exhibit B: Blake Butler’s nauseating (yet hypnotic) “Review of the New Wendy's Pretzel Burger.”
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Saving Hughes’s House
Last-minute signal boost! You have a few more hours to donate to I, Too, Arts Collective's campaign to convert Langston Hughes's former home into a non-profit cultural center. See also: our own Emily Wilkinson’s review of his Tambourines to Glory.
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