“The story of how Kafka’s papers made their way into an apartment owned by a self-professed cat lady, Eva Hoffe, seems like a story only Kafka himself could have written.” If you say so, NPR.
Oh, Kafka, we always reference you in times of simultaneous weirdness and banality.
Reality in Fantasy
“When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.” Lev Grossman writes for The Atlantic about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and why fantasy isn’t escapism. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki‘s review of Grossman’s latest novel, The Magician’s Land.
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One With Others
“She was to me and so many poets an exemplary and inimitable figure. And I mean to emphasize the tension between ‘exemplary’ and ‘inimitable’—what her example taught us was the necessity of going our own way, of being one with others.” Ben Lerner remembers C.D. Wright, who passed away earlier this week.
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“Notre Dame is a polarizing place.”
With apologies to Mary McCarthy, our own Bill Morris has revisited memories of his sports-crazed Catholic boyhood in Sunday’s New York Times — specifically why he has been a life-long hater of Notre Dame football.
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Writing Literary Twitter
“Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems and essays, the books we sell, the magazines we edit: all this output, this paper expelled out to the world, the screens we invade with our narratives, it all matters to us. But does it matter to everyone else?” mensah demary writes about the good, the bad, and the slightly neurotic of being a writer on Twitter for Electric Literature.
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War Stories
Over at The Rumpus, Caleb Cage interviewed Year in Reading alumnus Phil Klay about wars and human nature.
I’m Not Excited
The “Albums of Our Lives” series over at The Rumpus is a consistent source of entertaining essays. This week’s contribution, which focuses on Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City, is no aberration.