Recommended Reading: Walter Kirn’s “Confessions of an Ex-Mormon,” which has my vote for the best long form article on American religions since Lawrence Wright’s profile of Paul Haggis and the Church of Scientology.
On “America’s most misunderstood religion”
Branded
“It is all bricolage for personal identity building,” says Rob Horning of N+1, providing a somewhat bleak image of the “fast fashion” industry and social media, and what can be expected from the future.
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“The flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one”
If you’ve ever had a successful friend you secretly envied and maybe even hated, you may be in startlingly good company: a new reading of an old letter between Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot indicates that the “flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one” shared exactly this kind of frenemyship. Unrelated: a short recording of Eliot reading “The Naming of Cats.”
Slashing the Sestina
What’s better than slash fiction about your favorite authors? Slash sestinas about your favorite authors. At The Toast, Jade Sylvan writes three sestinas pairing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. “Two friends, writers, men,/in the most flamboyantly seedy café on the Left/Bank. Scott can’t get past the second word: ‘Write.'”
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Here Comes the Rooster
The Tournament of Books has returned, and this year’s judges include our own Kirstin Butler!
Not Quite a Review
“This is a tricky novel to review. I’m not even sure it is a novel. And I’m not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let’s-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer’s desk. What I can tell you is this: I was powerfully engaged and richly entertained by Sergio De La Pava’s Personae.” (Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote a profile of De La Pava.)
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Epic Fail Aces Its Lulz Studies
“While others … have explored the more serious contexts of online humor, particularly when it tilts into the grim and mean, in Epic Fail [Mark] O’Connell makes a useful addition to what I’ll refer to as Lulz Studies by attempting to put this variety of Schadenfreude in cultural-historical perspective.”
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