Last night, during President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, people were sending out 52,757 Obama related tweets per minute. This morning, the speech was fact checked. And here’s what Steve Almond wished Obama had said.
52,757
Purity from Prison
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” Barrett Brown reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Purity from prison. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book.
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The Laughing Monsters Excerpt
Recommended reading: An excerpt from Denis Johnson‘s upcoming novel, The Laughing Monsters, is available from Work in Progress.
Best New Poets
Poets, rejoice! Tracy K. Smith’s selections for Best New Poets 2015 have been announced. After you’ve checked them out, go take a look at Sophia Nguyen’s Millions essay on Smith’s newest memoir Ordinary Light.
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On Sexism in Literature
How do you feel about claims that men avoid reading women? Before you answer, consider this piece, which argues that sexism in the lit world is more complicated than it may appear. (For more, go check out our own piece on sexism on the internet, or else take a look at this Harvard Divinity School study on how sexism shapes responses to women’s writing.)
Lauren Wilkinson Wants to Buy Happiness
Lauren Wilkinson reflects on living in tenuous financial balance in her 20s, and feeling, 10 years and a lot of MFA-based debt later, that no amount of money will ever be "enough."
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Hodgman on the Apocalypse
Humorist, author, and sometime PC representative John Hodgman is interviewed for The A.V. Club. Among the discussion points? Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.
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The Bookseller Turned Spy
Avril Haines, the new deputy director of the CIA, had an interesting career before landing in the Langley. According to a Washington Post report, Haines used to own an independent bookstore in Baltimore, where she “welcomed patrons for the occasional readings of high-toned erotica over chicken tostadas.”
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The Best of 19th Century British Lit
If you don’t have any weekend plans, we suggest you spend your time on the British Library’s new Victorian and Romantic section of Discovering Literature. The site features 1,200 literary treasures, including a manuscript of Jane Eyre and 20 short documentaries.
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