Following Sarah Hepola’s devastating New York Times Magazine profile of Cat Marnell with empathy and queer theory, Jane Hu’s piece on what it means to read Marnell, to follow her and crave her work even as her work destroys her, merits reading and rereading.
Literary Bald Britney Spears
Lions, and Tigers, and Fords
Recommended Reading: This essay by Muna Mire and Messiah Rhodes on private policing in Detroit, Michigan. These few Millions essays on the Motor City will satisfy your Detroit fix.
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Tuesday New Release Day
The new release schedule is slowing down as the holidays approach, but David Foster Wallace fans can now get their hands on his undergraduate thesis, packaged by Columbia University Press as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will.
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Lydia Davis, Ctd.
Last year, I pointed readers to Numero Cinq, a new Canadian lit mag with a notably memorable tagline. In the latest issue, which is split into seventeen parts, Benjamin Woodard talks with Lydia Davis about her Flaubert translation, her new story collection and the art of writing while traveling. (h/t The Rumpus)
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Gatsby That Almost Were
From Letters of Note, the correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor upon the former's completion of The Great Gatsby (including Fitzgerald's suggestion for an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby). In response to the many endings of A Farewell to Arms, Slate cooks up 48 canned, alternative endings for Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
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dear Danez Smith
"But poems are not poems if they make people feel dead. I want people to feel alive – even if it is alive with grief." The Guardian profiles poet Danez Smith about poetry; race, gender, and queerness; and their poetry collection, Don't Call Us Dead (a finalist for the National Book Award). Pair with: an essay on writing that gives shape and depth to victims of criminal injustice.
Ask a Librarian
"Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?" "Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?" Oh, the things people have asked reference librarians.
iStephen Fry
Stephen Fry joins "the congregation at the Church of Apple" for the launch of the iPad and shares his thoughts on the company and its newest product.
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The Sound of Anathema
“Some psychiatrists say that music has therapeutic powers and can even restore fluidity and mental structure for a moment in some patients – music is the opposite of chaos. It may be that heavy metal, the music his parents blamed in part for this entire catastrophe, is the only thing that gives order to my cousin’s worn-out brain. No one knows, except him.” On trying to seek refuge from schizophrenia in heavy metal.
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