Here’s a video of Bill Murray reading two poems by Wallace Stevens. (As if you needed further evidence that Murray is a national treasure.)
Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens
Self-Absorption
A few days ago, our own Kaulie Lewis pointed readers to a LARB essay about Geoff Dyer, which nicely complemented a piece about the author our own Mark O’Connell wrote for Slate back in June. Now, at Full-Stop, David Burr Gerard suggests that Dyer’s strengths, which worked so well in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, may have hampered him in Another Great Day at Sea. FYI, our own Janet Potter reviewed the latter book for The Millions.
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“Fruit flies or not, I do have a heart,”
It’s come to this. Since it first emerged, the @horse_ebooks Twitter feed has been alternately obsessed over and totally ignored for its ersatz Dadaism. Now a group of intrepid fans have begun writing fan fiction dedicated to its enigmatic writing prompts.
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Irony and Equanimity
Recommended Reading: Critic James Wood for the New Yorker on one of the most significant literary heroes of the Holocaust, Primo Levi. The three-volume Complete Works of Primo Levi is out this week.
Speak Up
This graphic account of the uncomfortable on-stage conversation between Roxane Gay and Erica Jong at this year’s Decatur Book Festival comes from MariNaomi over at Electric Literature. Here are a few essays from The Millions that also deal with race, fatherhood, and fiction.
Sex, Drugs, and Literary History
Will anyone read Chuck Klosterman in a hundred years? Jonathan Russell Clark explores the possibility over at The Literary Hub: “What fate awaits the author of books so rooted in a given era? Can the accomplishment of capturing now remain significant or noteworthy forever? Will anyone read Klosterman in the future? And if they do, how will they read him?” In the mood for more JRC? How about his essay on the art of the first sentence?