PSA: The ebook of Infinite Jest now goes for just $4.99. (Might just be a limited time thing.)
DFW PSA
Drawing Straws
Recommended Reading: How to tell if you’re in a Shirley Jackson story.
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Plath People
“A month ago, I touched a lock of Sylvia Plath’s hair.” At Tin House, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky examines the relationship between the late poet and her fans.
After the Dawn
In 1958, the Indian writer Yashpal published the first installment of This Is Not that Dawn, an eleven-hundred-page novel and feminist epic written in Hindi. The book presages many of the biggest controversies affecting India today. At Page-Turner, Karan Mahajan reads the novel, explaining why he believes it to be “the greatest long novel about India.” Related: Mythilo G. Rao pays a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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Only a Gentile
Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Quentin Tarantino in The Atlantic and writes about why Inglorious Basterds is a very un-Jewish treatment of rage toward Nazis.
“The equal of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Turgenev”
Recommended Reading: Eileen Battersby on a new translation of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov.
The New Genre
Is Twitter an official literary genre? David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, and others take on the 140-character interface as a storytelling platform. Pair with our piece on the best of literary Twitter.
Rereading Dostoevsky
David Denby wonders: After nearly 150 years have passed since its initial publication and countless imitators have blunted its artistic radicalism does Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground still pack a punch? For more contemporary readings of Dostoevsky, see Rob Goodman’s recent article on forensics, The Brothers Karamazov and the death of the courtroom drama.
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