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.”
“I don’t believe the reader needs to know anything about me.”
Graduating from Hogwarts
J.K. Rowling will be releasing her first novel for adults on Little, Brown and Co. Details are set to come out later this year.
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The Twilight Generation
What happens when you grow up reading Harry Potter, Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey? At The Morning News, five women discuss what it meant to come of age reading these books. “It’s more socially acceptable for a guy to watch porn than it is for a twentysomething woman to read these books. There is something that bothers me about that,” one women said.
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O Detroit
You may have heard that our own Bill Morris has a new book on shelves. He talked about it with fellow Millions staff writer and California author Edan Lepucki. At the LARB, Diana Clarke reviews the book, which she calls “a sharp critique of the contemporary American post-racial narrative,” among other things.
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James Cameron on Mars
Movies on Mars–that’s Avatar director James Cameron‘s newest project and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab will reap the benefits. At the Pasadena Star News, the story of how Cameron’s camera will give a 3D eye to the next Mars rover.
Poetry Is Politics, Politics Is Poetry
Citizen author Claudia Rankine spoke about racial tokenism in MFA workshops in her AWP keynote speech last week. As she puts it, “The white students aren’t being challenged to think harder about the assumptions they are making in workshop.”
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Back to the Big Easy; Avoiding Bourbon Street
It’s two weeks past Mardi Gras, so you’re probably ready to revisit New Orleans by now. Good timing. Narrative.ly has a week’s worth of stories on the Big Easy, entitled “Beyond Bourbon Street.” (Related: I recommend reading Tulane’s Richard Campanella’s recent piece for Design Observer: “Hating Bourbon Street.”)
Note: protagonist of Ben Lerner’s novel is “Adam Gordon,” not “The Author.”