Instead of Craigslist, the people of Berlin use fliers and lampposts to “send romantic messages to strangers they’ve seen on a train.”
Print’s Not Dead
This Bug’s Life
Tea with beetles, chess and lemonade with butterflies, laundry day with a praying mantis–it’s the stuff of children’s books and the dioramas of San Francisco artist Lisa Wood, now on display at The Gold Bug in Pasadena, CA.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ellis; Moore; Hodge
Out this week: Normal by Warren Ellis; The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories; and The Best American Magazine Writing 2016. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
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Something Brewing on Twitter
Be sure you’re following @The_Millions on Twitter if you’re interested in entering our first ever sponsored giveaway of a special signed book. Look for details on Twitter later today.
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Body Works
Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel includes, among other discomfiting things, a series of fake advertisements for surreal women’s beauty products. The plot, which follows a proofreader named A, begins with the main character’s attempt to evade her roommate, and eventually brings A to join a “Church of Conjoined Eaters.” At Slate, Molly Fischer argues the book deftly captures our society’s weird treatment of femininity.
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
So does literature really have the power to bring liberals and conservatives together? Probably not. Either way, this is still a fascinating study: “The ‘most startling result was this: it was conservative — not liberal — readers who are most active in producing this space of cultural compromise.’ Basically, within this sample size, conservative readers tended to exude more generous praise for ‘bridge books’ and did so with a vernacular considered to be ‘less heated or emotional.’ Grammatically, they also expressed ‘more complex thoughts.'”
Real Grit
At the LARB, Anne Trubek quotes Lionel Trilling in a review of The Son and American Rust, the two books published thus far by New Yorker 20 Under 40 alum Phillipp Meyer. “In the American metaphysic,” Trilling wrote in his essay “Reality in America,” “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.” Those of you who read our pieces on both books may be able to guess why the quote is relevant.
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Terrible Beauty
Nobody needs reminding that Yeats was a major poet, but it can be easy to forget, a hundred years of his major work, just why his poetry has endured. In The Irish Times, Denis O’Donoghue makes a forceful case for Yeats’s relevance, arguing that “Yeats solved, or came closer than any other modern poet in English to solving, the problem that defeated so many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the claims of common speech, morally responsible, with the insisted-on autonomy of the poem.”
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