New Yorkers! Come out tonight and celebrate Kingsley Amis alongside the Volume 1 Brooklyn crew, the New York Review of Books Classics publishers, and also such guests as Parul Sehgal, Rosie Schaap, and Maud Newton. There will be free gin! However if you can’t make it, you can treat yourself to the Kingsley Amis Desert Island Discs from the comfort of your own home. The discs, recorded around the time The Old Devils was published, reveal the author’s views on “novel mechanics,” the “Welsh temperament,” and his affinity for jazz.
Raise a Glass to Kingsley Amis
You’re Invited
We have discussed the gender gap in literature more than once. At McSweeney’s, you’re invited to an all-male, all-white literary panel. Sounds fun.
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Answering Ophelia
Recommended Reading: Almost a century ago, two students at Oxford wrote back to Ophelia: “Ophelia racked with phantasy, / And Sigismunda, sick with rue — / Ladies, why did ye choose to die / When all the world was made for you?” Find out more about the poets Doreen Wallace and Eleanore Geach at The Toast. We recently wrote about why authors continually turn to Shakespeare.
Google Knows You
Daniel Soar takes a close look at what Google is searching for in its users.
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Springfield, Springfield, It’s a Hell of a Town!
In a big reveal to devout fans like me, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening finally copped to the fictional Springfield’s real-life inspiration: Springfield, Oregon. Of course this matter has been widely pondered before, and was perhaps even answered by Paul Nelson and his cohorts at SNPP.com.
“The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion.”
Anaïs Nin had a lot to say about writing erotic fiction. Notably, she was unwilling to “leave out the poetry” and “concentrate on sex” in its place, despite repeated requests from her anonymous client to do just that. On a lighter note, Seth Fried also has some advice for aspiring writers of erotica. Quick, somebody get both of these articles to E. L. James.
Hey Dr. Sandman
“During various periods of my life I have succumbed to the siren call of sleeping pills. It is hard to resist their promise: one tablet, and your night will be purged. Your brain may be in overdrive, its receptors working away, hungrily awaiting more images and information, but like a computer it is forced into another mode. Yet the little white disks with a dent down the middle are no panacea; whenever I take one of these thought guillotines I feel trapped in a grey zone, seesawing between mid and shallow slumber, mind and body dulled but not of their own accord.” A lifelong insomniac recounts her long struggle with the illness.