What do Talking Heads, The Smiths, Judas Priest, and Blondie have in common? They’re all featured in the playlist Picador made to accompany the paperback release of Jeffrey Eugenides’s latest novel, The Marriage Plot. The Spotify list is chock full of songs “Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell might have been listening to in the early 1980s.” You can read Eugenides’s take on the book’s genesis over here, too.
The Marriage Playlist
A Classic Drawing
"There is always something lost, or exchanged, when the imagined world evoked by the written word, unique for every reader, is replaced by a provided set of visual references. In this particular case, the artist is faced with translating the unbelievable, even the metaphysical, into visual imagery, and within a relatively constrained form." Jenna Brager on Hope Larson's graphic novel adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.
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7x20x21 Recap
If you didn’t make it to BEA this year, first be thankful that you didn’t have to eat any of the food around the Javits Center. Then, check out some of the highlights from the comfort of your desk chair. I recommend Ami Greko and Ryan Chapman’s perennially excellent 7x20x21 panel, which this year featured Nate Silver, Dan Wilbur, and Sheila Heti among others.
Football Book Club: Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’
This week, Football Book Club is taking it to the next level: They're reading Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and posting about Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half. If you're keeping score at home, that means this week is All Brosh, All the Time. Also, as per usual, they will not be watching the NFL and not liking it one bit.
Fact-checking Steinbeck
As John Steinbeck's classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author's cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn't set out to trash the Nobel laureate. "As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy," Steigerwald tells the New York Times. "He liked guns; he liked property rights."
On the Rise of the Mass Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia has been growing larger and more democratic for hundreds of years, but the spread of today’s mass intelligentsia “is arguably happening on a far larger scale,” writes Philosophy For Life author Jules Evans.
The Remains of the Screen
"Any reasonably skilled novelist can evoke on the page the texture of memory, drawing the reader into the half-remembered, the blurred edges, the nervous nostalgia, the meandering associations across time and geography. In contrast, flashbacks on screen tend always to be clumsy beasts, announcing their arrival with unwanted fanfare and knocked-over furniture. Why is this?" Kazuo Ishiguro on film, and other novelists' second-favorite art forms.
American Book Awards
The 2014 National Book Awards were just announced earlier this week. In celebration, The Paris Review took a look back at the American Book Awards, which "serve as a reminder that ostensibly prestigious institutions—institutions whose authority and taste depend on their perceived stability—are just as susceptible to whims and trends as the rest of us, which is to say very."
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