Melville House has one of the short stories from Tao Lin’s Bed up for your noontime reading pleasure.
“Life was not cake.”
Scientists on Science Fiction
In New Scientist, several prominent scientists and literary types “nominate their lost sci-fi classics,” from Richard Dawkins on Dark Universe to William Gibson on Random Acts of Senseless Violence.
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Thrill Ride
Stephen King’s next book is a thriller set in a Midwestern town suffering from unemployment. Before this sounds a little too close to home, the synopsis reveals it’s about a retired cop trying to stop a mass murderer. Mr. Mercedes will be out June 3rd. Pair with: Our own Lydia Kiesling’s essay on her love of King novels.
This is your brain on metaphor
Annie Murphy Paul looks to neuroscience to understand the pleasure of the written word.
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Mount Airy, North Carolina
Carve out some time today, and let Evan Smith Rakoff show you how a wonderful essay about Andy Griffith can also be about Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, John Keats, ambition, nostalgia, the Hollywood blacklist, class, and grief.
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No Longer Science Fiction
“Set in the 2020s and 2030s in a collapsing and crashed America, the Parables books have always seemed incredibly and disturbingly prescient—and in the wake of November 8, 2016 they now seem downright spooky, the actual and accurate history of the future.” How Octavia Butler predicted the present. See also: our consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
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Sic transit gloria mundi
Two sides of a related coin: on authors whose fame died before they did, and on authors who died before they finished their work.
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