When a professor of literature wrote Flannery O’Connor for a master key for interpreting her story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” he probably did not expect her particularly unimpressed reply: “Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.” (Via the ever-excellent Letters of Note.)
A state of shock.
Book & Beer
To kick off German Literature Month, Melville House’s marketing manager picked the best beers to drink as you read Heinrich Böll. Now Dogfish Head’s brewmaster Sam Calagione has paired beers with a few other literary classics.
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“Binders Full of Women”
Mitt Romney’s debate remark about where he finds women when he needs to fill some jobs has inspired hundreds of witty product reviewers on Amazon.
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Bond. Sixty Years of Bond.
Beth Carswell takes a look at sixty years’ worth of James Bond book designs. Which one is your favorite?
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He’s the Ragtime King / There is None Higher…
Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Doctorow sire (in his post E.L. Doctorow – Badass M.C.) Back in grad school, we just called him “The Funk Doc.”
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Culture Club
Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
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Complete Archive of Paris Review Interviews Available Online
Lorin Stein has made the complete archive of The Paris Review interviews available for free online. The New York Times explains why this is such fantastic news: “The first issue of The Paris Review contained an interview with E.M. Forster. The new issue contains two, with Norman Rush…and the French controversialist Michel Houellebecq. In between there have been more than 300 others, from Ernest Hemingway (as indignant as a gored bull) to Jorge Louis Borges (funny and quizzical) and Hunter S. Thompson (surely on a variety of pharmaceuticals). Nearly all are worth a look-in.”
An American Poem
“I offer you a moody campaign!” Illustrator Nathan Gould revisits the 1992 presidential election, in which badass feminist (and really great writer) Eileen Myles ran as an “openly-female” write-in candidate.