Season Three of Downton Abbey arrived on our shores last night, and if you’re interested in learning more about the show’s literary pedigree, our own Garth Risk Hallberg has you covered.
Books with Class
Glory Edim’s Empire of Knowledge
Well-Read Black Girl founder Glory Edim spoke to HuffPost's "We Built This" series on her passion for literacy and the urgency of protecting black women.
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The Bard For 100
Jonathan Franzen knows a lot about birds. The novelist competed on Jeopardy’s “Power Players Week” alongside Chuck Todd and S.E. Cupp as part of a variation on the Celebrity Jeopardy theme. Franzen flubbed a few questions about Shakespeare which, ironically, served to help dispel some of the “old curmudgeon” reputation that has followed him for years. This piece from The Millions on the case for non-Ikea writing in the Age of Franzen might interest you.
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Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts.” Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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So Far So Good
Recommended reading (and reading, and reading): Oyster has listed the “100 Best Books of the Decade So Far,” led by Teju Cole‘s Open City, which was reviewed for the Millions here.
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To the Choir
It can be hard for critics to strike a balance between high theory and accessible prose. For James Wood, the key is to retain enough theoretical knowledge to come up with an insightful point, while still retaining the ability to write in a natural dialect. In The Guardian, he talks about his own relationship with books.
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Night Watch
Recommended Reading: Thomas Dylan Eaton on the Austrian writer Peter Handke.
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New Directions’ Birthday Bash
On a more optimistic note, New Directions, New York City’s inestimable and long struggling (but “long dazzling!”) publishing house, will be throwing itself a 75th birthday party on Thursday, October 27. (They just redesigned their website and colophon, too.)