Writing for The Dublin Review of Books, Kevin Stevens reviews Saul Bellow: Letters, the collected correspondence of “Wise Guy” Saul Bellow, “one of America’s best writers and most interesting men.”
Saul Bellow, “Wise Guy”
Hello Stranger
It’s already mid-morning, but have you really started writing yet? If you’re procrastinating, it might be because you see your future self as a stranger. Psychologists believe that because we don’t know who we will be years from now, we fail to make good decisions for the long term. Perhaps both your current and future selves can agree you just want to finish that novel already.
●
●
Meet Ironheart
“I just think it’ll have such a positive effect on the geek community, the black girl community, the black geek girl community… just opening the doors of your mind to what you can achieve.” The newest character to wear Iron Man’s suit? A 15-year-old girl named Riri Williams, reports NPR. As for your own inner geek, might they be interested in an unauthorized corporate history of Marvel Comics?
Are Books Clutter?
When Marie Kondo's Netflix show came out, Hannah McGregor writes for Electric Literature, "the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter."
●
●
●
Up South
“Young black fiction writers in the U.S. often face a strange obstacle as they try to figure out who they are — it’s called American literature. A high number of pre-civil-rights-era novels by white American writers are likely to include tossed-off racial slurs and/or stock black characters, some of which make racially conscious readers want to hurl the book across the room, even if the wooly-headed pickaninnies are only peeking around a doorjamb on one page out of 400. There are exceptions, but shockingly few. You always have to brace yourself — always.” James Hannaham writes about growing up in Yonkers but finding himself in Southern literature.
●
●
And on and on and on.
Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (a book length study of Celine Dion‘s megablockbusting album of the same name), revisits the enduring and sort of nauseating classic from Titanic‘s soundtrack in The Atlantic.
●
●