“If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it’s a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it’s worrying.” Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky interviews the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa about the contemporary collapse between “high” and “low” cultures.
Civilization of the Spectacle
SPD Books Discount
SPD Books' staff picks are 40% off!
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Gone but Not Forgotten
"Their relative obscurity is what makes their fans so passionate — these are voices that never quite found the right audience when they were alive." Longreads has a reading list of forgotten women writers, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Anita Brookner, whom we profiled in our own pages last year.
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Come On, Karma
From Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, here are five of the most annoyingly unpunished characters in all of literature. Can we petition to have Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby) added to this list?
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Seminar-Worthy Stocking Stuffers
In a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Mesle reviews Mallory Ortberg's Texts from Jane Eyre, which "is not only a major work of bathroom humor reading, but also a significant contribution to feminist literary criticism. It is difficult to imagine another book that would both be a perfect stocking stuffer and an exemplary text for a seminar in literary studies."
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“I’d grown up watching and playing baseball.”
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ex-Husband Can also Write a Memoir
The former Mrs. Elizabeth Gilbert--that is, Michael Cooper, the husband Gilbert left at the opening of Eat Pray Love, has apparently written a book about his life after their divorce. Will it ever be published?
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Perfect Punctuation
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New Deborah Eisenberg Story
In a 2010 profile, Deborah Eisenberg told us, of her current efforts at writing fiction, "I’m sort of desperately throwing myself against pieces of paper and only coming up with what look like bug smears." Now, as will shock none of her readers Eisenberg has come up with something considerably more appetizing: a new short story called "Recalculating." It's available, free, at the NYRB (!).
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