Without the influence of Black Beauty, current opinions of horses and preadolescent girls’ reading lists might have looked very different.
Saddle Club
We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
Roxane Gay rounded up a massive, crowdsourced list of writers of color. While the list is by no means exhaustive, it might be a necessary measure in proving “the world of letters is far more diverse than the publishing climate would lead us to believe.”
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Elkin’s 80th
Today would be author Stanley Elkin’s 80th. On this occasion, one fan posts an excerpt from The Franchiser and suggests “Read it out loud three times: the first to hear the sounds, the second to feel your mouth and tongue and throat make the sounds, the third time to listen to what Elkin is saying.”
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Defining American Writing
In TNR, Ruth Franklin attempts to debunk the “strangely antiquated definition of American writing” posited in Dalkey’s Best European Fiction anthology. (via)
Boy Meets World, Boy Meets Girl
In a perfect mix of high and low art, Samuel L. Jackson performed a slam poem about Boy Meets World on The Tonight Show. “Daughter of hippies/Name of a gypsy/’Topanga,’ Corey cries.”
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A Critical Take on Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer may not have exactly “self-plagiarized” his own work, but he certainly did recycle a good amount of his writing in a misleading way. And while many have criticized this kind of lazy writing, it’s worth revisiting Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist’s critical review of Lehrer’s book, Imagine, which plays a central role in this entire scandal.
“An index also lays out the complexity of the book into pristine statements”
In a neat little essay for Vouched Books, Kyle Winkler advocates indexing as a means of tempering the “fuckstorm of reading.”
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Finding Peter Cat
We already knew that Haruki Murakami was a writer and runner but a former jazz club owner, too? Aaron Gilbreath visited Murakami’s 1970s jazz club, Peter Cat, and found “a drab three-story cement building. Outside, a first-floor, a restaurant had set up a sampuru display of plastic foods.” For more Murakami, read our review of 1Q84.