It’s 1957. You’re Truman Capote. Your editor at The New Yorker, inspired in part by an excellent sense of humor, has asked you to write about an upcoming film (based on a novel by James Michener) that stars none other than Marlon Brando. How do you handle it?
Encountering an Enfant Terrible
1,000 on Twitter
Cheers to @Selorian for becoming the 1,000th follower of @The_Millions on Twitter.
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CSI: Poetry Edition
An international group of forensic experts studying the poet Pablo Neruda‘s remains, which were ordered exhumed in 2013, says he didn’t die of cancer, as the Nobel laureate’s official cause of death states. The question remains: was he poisoned? And if you want to see how Neruda lived, perhaps you might enjoy this tour of writers’ houses.
Sorkin Takes on the News
Fans of West Wing, will no doubt be excited to hear that a new Aaron Sorkin series is on its way. The Newsroom will follow the action at a cable news network and is set to air on HBO this summer.
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Such Thing As a FAT MIND?
“Directly you are in motion you will feel quite helpless, and experience a sensation of being run away with, and it will seem as if the machine were trying to throw you off.” The bicycle was little more than a confusing craze back in 1877. The London Library has just uncovered some fascinating and hilarious vintage educational pamphlets on everything from ‘The Gentlewoman’s Book of Sports’ to ‘Cycling As a Cause of Heart Disease.’
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RIP E.L. Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow, the renowned novelist and fiction writer best known for books including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and the National Book Award-winning World’s Fair, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 84. You could read one of our numerous pieces about his work if you’d like to look back on his life and career.
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Bernhard and Olive Garden
“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
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Dear Diary
Lena Dunham’s next book looks to be every bit as divisive as her first. The chapbook, Is It Evil Not To Be Sure?, is a collection of Dunham’s college diaries from 2005 to 2006 — or basically, that recurring nightmare you have that somebody might find and read your journal.
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