Do I need to hype this one up? I shouldn’t. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, or what some call the “greatest Southern novel ever written.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan on William Faulkner
Back Home
Sometimes, a writer needs to live in the setting of his or her fiction, as was the case with William Faulkner, who famously took a train from Hollywood to Mississippi solely to break through his writer’s block. Other times, they need to move away to find the inspiration to write about their home. In The Globe and Mail, Marsha Lederman writes about Emma Hooper, who credits her move to England with helping her write a novel set in her native Saskatchewan.
Passé Profanity
“Certain words have gone from being shocking to being neutered,” says Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, who has embraced the printing of “vulgar words” on her magazine’s cover since November of 2011. Ms. Leive is one of several women’s magazine editors who believe “magazines are catching up with other media, where women have been using explicit language for years.”
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Library of Lagging
“‘There is almost no work, within the vast range of literature and science,’ [Thomas Jefferson] wrote in an 1874 report, ‘which may not at some time prove useful to the legislature of a great nation.’ Thus the Library Of Congress’s mandate expanded: it would acquire anything and everything of importance … By the late 19th century, the LOC had become a kind of national brain trust, a heritage of information that aspired to timelessness.” This piece on the Library of Congress and its internet progress (or lack thereof) is fascinating and thorough. Go and spend some time with the digital archive, there are only around seven million gigabytes of information for you to thumb through.
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Platform Proliferation
The Atlantic points out another consequence of the digital revolution: books now come in multiple formats at dozens of price points. A symptom of publisher panic? A boon for readers?
Time Out of Mind
Are we now living in a golden age of the uncanny? The Millions contributor Porochista Khakpour suspects that we are, and she also suspects that our historical moment, populated as it is with alienating developments and surreal art, is key to understanding the work of Helen Oyeyemi. In the Times, Khakpour reviews Oyeyemi’s new novel. (You could also read both writers’ Year in Reading pieces.)
From Isolation to Affluence
“It’s likely Lucia would have felt more comfortable watching a bull be gored in a Mexico City arena or huddling among winos on a corner in Oakland than she ever felt at her first place on posh Mapleton Hill.” Elizabeth Geoghegan for The Paris Review on Lucia Berlin, whose A Manual For Cleaning Women is out now.
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