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.
Barrels of Laughs
A while back, our own Mark O’Connell argued that Flann O’Brien, in The Poor Mouth, was the funniest writer who ever lived. Now, in an essay, Erin Somersin says the title should go to Mordecai Richler instead. She writes about the Canadian author’s unique sense of humor in a piece for the Ploughshares blog.
Just Right
The National Rifle Association is featuring a series of reimagined fairy tales on their website. The only difference? Way more guns. In the debut story, Hansel and Gretel don't bemoan their lack of food since they had been taught from birth to hunt with guns for sustenance. No, it's not yet April Fools' Day.
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True Romance
"Dive bars are full of beautiful dreamers." True or false? If you answered true, you might be a romantic. Take Daniel Handler's quiz to determine whether you're prone to romance or cynicism, and then plan your Valentine's Day accordingly.
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Kuala Lumpur Timelapse
It’s been a while since I’ve linked to a really gorgeous timelapse video, so here’s Rob Whitworth’s wonderful look at Kuala Lumpur.
An Existential Test
"It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test." Courtney Maum writes about the darker side of publishing a first book.
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And So It Goes
Before he died, Kurt Vonnegut gave the go-ahead that has allowed Charles Shields to construct And So It Goes, an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography, even if it’s hard to tell just how authorized this book really is.
Stories in Verse
In 2010, the poet Tarfia Faizullah traveled to Bangladesh to speak with the survivors of the 1971 Liberation War. Eventually, she wrote a poetry collection about those interviews, which went on to win the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. At The Paris Review Daily, Sean Carman interviews Faizullah.