What’s a Wordsworth scholar to do when nature offers him no epiphanies?
I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
Kanye & The Frankfurt School
Alex Ross writes for The New Yorker about Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and modern pop culture. Jay-Z and Kanye come up, as does Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (which we've written about here and here) and Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
Bookstore Boon
The shuttering of Borders locations across the country, an "unusually vibrant selection" of new releases, and "customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles" have contributed to "surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores" across the country.
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20 Writers to Watch
Another response to The New Yorker's 20 under 40 list, this time from Dzanc Books. Dzanc polled "nearly 100 independent publishers, agents, editors, bloggers and reviewers" and went through two rounds of voting to come up with 20 Writers to Watch: An Alternate List.
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“Vague enough to be useful”
At Full-Stop, Nicholson Baker talks with David Burr Gerard about his new novel, Henry James and the envy he feels for Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. (Related: our own Bill Morris reviewed Baker's House of Holes.)
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I Want My MTV
For those among us who have missed the eighties, from now until November 8th, Esquire magazine is hosting a special pop-up edition of SPY, that late-millennial stalwart of satirical journalism. Co-founder (and novelist) Kurt Andersen said he was moved to bring the magazine back because "lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, 'SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election.'"
If it's election satire you want, we highly recommend our own Jacob Lambert's literary cagematch: Hemingway vs. Faulkner vs. Trump.
On Marathon Readings
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, David Shapiro remarks on the current popularity of the marathon reading, or “a format of communal public performance that has more in common with the filibuster than the conventional literary reading.” Previously, Jeff Price wrote a piece on our site concerning the particular camaraderie that arises among participants and audience members during marathon readings. (As a bonus: I share a David Foster Wallace anecdote in the comments for that piece.)
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