Did you dig Mark O’Connell’s review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo so much that you yearn for more? Well, here’s the author’s interview with Capital, and here’s Parul Sehgal’s take on how the book’s “taut mousetrap ready to go off” sadly “never snaps.”
Once more about Martin Amis, dear friends, once more
Just a Formality
The novelist Julie Schumacher wrote her latest, Dear Committee Members, entirely in the form of letters of recommendation. The format allowed her to illustrate the travails of a creative writing professor through a medium often ignored in fiction. At The Awl, Jessica Gross and Merve Emre talk about the novel. Pair with: Cathy Day on academia’s novel crisis.
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Tennessee Williams’s College Days
The Strand Magazine is publishing a previously unseen Tennessee Williams short story in its spring issue. “Crazy Night” is about Williams’s lovelorn college days when he describes sex like “vaccination the first day of school.”
The Character of Retreat
Part Into the Wild, part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing is the story of his two years spent in profound solitude in the Vermont wilderness. Called “torture” by prison rights activists and “a threat to mental stability” by psychologists, Axelrod’s decision to sequester himself from society was nothing if not extreme. Alexander Supertramp would be proud.
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What Ails You
Recommended Reading: Andrew Solomon on tribal cures for depression.
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Colson Whitehead, Book by Book
Elevator inspectors, beach vacations, zombie movies: these are just a few of the things that have inspired Colson Whitehead's books over the years.
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One Translation To Rule Them All
“Despite a glut of English translations (well over a hundred, by my count),” writes Dante scholar Robert Pogue Harrison, “New versions of the entire [Divine Comedy] poem or individual canticles continue to appear in rapid succession—six in the last decade alone.” Over at the New York Review of Books, he investigates three of the latest: Dan Brown’s Inferno, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno, and Clive James’s Divine Comedy.
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Bert and Ernie’s Wedding Plans
Sesame Workshop has released an official statement to address calls for Bert and Ernie to marry each other.