Writing for the BBC, Steve Rosenberg looks at the lasting impact and significance of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published fifty years ago this month.
“One story shook the Soviet Union.”
Don’t Fear the Digital
A recent Pew Study reveals that, despite all trend pieces to the contrary, young people still like to read.
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Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
Capote Quiz
The OUP's blog has created a Truman Capote quiz. The idea is to match the author's quotation with its literary victim.
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Yes.
Your dandruff falls like the fixtures within a scenic railway passing through a thousand bearded rainbows... Compliment courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator! (Via.)
The Great Terry Castle
"Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle -- incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate," says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus's short story "Leaving the Sea" in the current issue of Tin House.
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With One Eye Squinted
“I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” The New Yorker reports on "Flannery O'Connor's Manhattan Memorial" and pitch-perfect quotation.
The Man and His Image
Recommended Reading: Can we separate Knausgaard the writer from Knausgaard the narrator?
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