John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Diary” for the Financial Times features the Mars Curiosity, Quaker school songs, and all sorts of family bonding.
“I have always wondered.”
Haruki Murakami on Memory Versus Reality
Memory is at the forefront as Haruki Murakami discusses his new story, "With the Beatles," with Deborah Treisman.
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Read, Watch, Binge
As a part of their Read, Watch, Binge! summer series, NPR recommends TV series, movies, books, and more based on 60 of their readers favorite books. If you’re looking for more books, check out our Great Second-Half Fiction Preview.
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“Our job is to analyse data, not to love words.”
The Telegraph catches up with John Simpson as he prepares to retire from his role as chief editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. “I used to keep a notebook in my pocket in case I came across new words,” Simpson says at one point. “That worked until I put my trousers in the washing machine.”
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Televising Literature
“Tom Stoppard isn’t shy about tackling literary giants. The British playwright has rewritten Hamlet for the stage and recently turned Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina into a Hollywood feature. But he struggled with a television adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s sprawling modernist masterpiece Parade’s End.”
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Least Favorite “Great Books”
Elif Batuman, Francine Prose, and Lorin Stein are among the critics, authors, and editors who reveal their least favorite “great books.”
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“Then suddenly, a bicycle”
“Since I often biked to my therapist’s, he took note of my helmet and asked how my new exercise regimen was going. It’s going great! I said. I love it! I wish I’d known earlier that I ought to bike. Now I hated going underground. It was like the death instinct to go underground, into the subway. I never realized I hated it so utterly until I didn’t have to do it anymore.” On riding a bike in New York.
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New Ishiguro: The Buried Giant
We didn’t catch it in time for our big preview, but Kazuo Ishiguro’s forthcoming novel The Buried Giant, now has an official U.S. release date of March 2015. The novel is the author’s first in 10 years, and his British publisher says it will be about “lost memories, love, revenge and war.”
The So-Called Elite
n+1 provides a fascinating study of today’s divisive concept of cultural elitism: “Today, though, it’s the bearers of culture rather than the wielders of power who are taxed with elitism. If the term is applied to powerful people, this is strictly for cultural reasons, as the different reputations of the identically powerful Obama and Bush attest. No one would think to call a foul-mouthed four-star general an elitist, even though he commands an army, any more than the term would cover a private equity titan who hires Rod Stewart to serenade his 60th birthday party.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan is the most overrated writer currently being overrated. I just got done reading “Diary” and all I can say is, That’s it? That’s what passes for the best American letters has to offer, according to most of the blogosphere and a good portion of the Quality Lit world. I felt the same way about 80% of Pulphead. So now I think I’ve read enough of John Jeremiah Sullivan to have an educated opinion. I wouldn’t say his writing is bad, it’s not, it’s good, it’s fine, I guess. More laconic Midwestern earnestness. Yawn.