Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
Listen Up!
Shepard’s Final Word
"He wrote the first drafts by hand, and when that became too difficult, dictated sections of the book into a tape recorder." Before his death in July, playwright and actor Sam Shepard wrote a novel called Spy of the First Person, which is forthcoming from Knopf in December. From our archives, a list of writers who also act.
Virtual Fictitious Reality
"In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being 'a lonely, anti-social affair'—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)" It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
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The New Fiction of Solitude
“If we are now relentlessly connected, every marginal identity gaining collective recognition, becoming assimilated, ever more rapidly? If that is where we stand, then something like a stubbornly solitary voice may be welcome, even necessary, telling us that what it means to be human—and what may keep us human—is to feel alone in a strange room, with our seclusion the thing that defines and can save us.” On bearing witness to the spectacle of aloneness and the fiction of empathy.
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I lucked out with those blurbs
An interview with Tom Bissell in which he drops this gem while talking about John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer: "I prefer to think of that kind of nonfiction as a voice whispering to you in the night. "
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Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include Keith Richard’s rock memoir Life, reviewed for The Millions by Jim Santel, Michael Caine’s The Elephant to Hollywood, an "unabashedly old-school celebrity memoir” according to its New York Times review, and Stephen Sondheim’s songwriting book Finishing the Hat.
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My Dear Meat Paste
The Scottish poet Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis” might well be the most famous ode to a food product in the English canon. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein celebrates Burns's birthday by reflecting on the poem, which starts off by describing haggis as the “chieftain of the pudding race.”
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