The best longread you’re likely to find this afternoon: Martin Amis talks to David Wallace-Wells about his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, America’s decline, politics, porn, post-modernism and more. Amis even dodges another attempt to bring up that book he wrote about videogames that nobody will let him live down.
“You can’t be up the reader’s ass, as many a writer I think is—cute as hell, ingratiating as hell.”
Tintin Ruling
Good news for Tintinologists, if not guards of political correctness: Tintin in the Congo has been deemed "not racist" by a Belgian judicial adviser.
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Oscar Wilde: An Infographic
The Guardian broke down Oscar Wilde’s most enduring and quotable aphorisms, and presented the entire thing as an infographic. For serious fans of the Irish wit, perhaps the effect of this chart may lead to an "infogasm."
Slightly Off
Expats of all stripes have trouble defining the word “home,” which is true even when the expat is someone like James Wood, who left England for America in the ‘90s and set up a life for himself in Massachusetts. In the LRB, he describes the odd pain of emigration, lamenting that his "English reality" has faded into memory. (You could also read Charles Finch on trying to live up to Wood’s standards.)
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The Essay Crown
Could James Baldwin be America’s greatest essayist? Ta-Nehisi Coates believes so -- at The Atlantic, he argues that The Fire Next Time shows Baldwin committing “amazing acts of intellectual and emotional courage.” (Related: Buzz Poole paid tribute to Baldwin back in 2008.)
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Art as Activism
"In the media there are a very limited number of ways that people are used to seeing sex-worker characters, and I definitely wanted to break out of that." The Los Angeles Review of Books interviews Aya de León about her debut novel, Uptown Thief.
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