Allan Gurganus commemorates the 100th anniversary of his teacher and friend John Cheever’s birth. “Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia,” Gurganus writes, “was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal in a nation this Republican.”
A Century of Cheever
Stranger Danger
“When someone asks me how I know someone and I say ‘the Internet,’ there is often a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d met through a benign but vaguely kinky hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The first generation of digital natives are coming of age, but two strangers meeting online is still suspicious…” Ah, the halcyon days of 2004 and internet anonymity.
Arm on the Armrest
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Run (and Write) Like the Wind
“But writers and runners know that when you settle into a long-distance run or hit your stride with the work, something other than your body takes over.” For LitHub, our own Nick Ripatrazone writes about the similarities between long-distance running and writing. Pair with: an essay on the poetics of running.
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Emazing
Fans of the French Oulipo movement will know about A Void, the Georges Perec novel written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” What very few readers of any kind know, however, is that in 1939, thirty years before Perec’s novel was published, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book in English, Gadsby, that hewed to these same constraints. At The Atlantic, Nikhil Sonnad investigates how this experiment plays out in the book.
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The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
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Quarantined with Mrs. Dalloway
If you find yourself rereading Mrs. Dalloway while in lockdown, you're not alone. Evan Kindley examines why the novel is a balm for anxious readers.
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dismayed he isn’t read more widely–