Recommended Reading: Matthew Salesses’ new story in the latest Guernica, “High Schools, or How to Be Asian American.”
Some Wednesday Reading from Mr. Salesses
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The Character of Retreat
Part Into the Wild, part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing is the story of his two years spent in profound solitude in the Vermont wilderness. Called “torture” by prison rights activists and “a threat to mental stability” by psychologists, Axelrod’s decision to sequester himself from society was nothing if not extreme. Alexander Supertramp would be proud.
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The New Gutenberg
In the latest issue of Harvard magazine, Nathan Heller writes about Arion Press, the last remaining “full-service letterpress in the United States.” Apparently Arion, which has “an in-house foundry where lead is melted into ingots,” sells editions of canonical titles (like Ulysses) that retail for thousands of dollars. (h/t our own Kevin Hartnett)
“Medvedev is Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer”
n+1 posted the introduction Keith Gessen wrote for Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good poetry and essay collection, which Gessen translated along with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich.
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Niche Audience
Like YA novels? Harbor a certain affection for the book publishing arm of McSweeney’s? Then you’re the prime audience for this excerpt of The Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, Michelle Tea’s contribution to the publisher’s new Mullens imprint. (Naturally, it’s the first in a trilogy.)
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Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
This essay on the proliferation of gossip in journalism is adapted from Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit. In it, Epstein discusses the problem of “how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism.”
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David Foster Wallace Syllabus
The Harry Ransom Center has scanned and uploaded the syllabus from David Foster Wallace‘s Fall 1994 section of English 102: Literary Analysis.
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