Creative writing teachers ply a hazardous trade. Don’t believe us? Then maybe this frightening tale — excerpted from an upcoming book, Give Me Everything You Have, which you can read more about in our preview — will help change your mind.
“I Will Ruin Him”
Pawnee Central
A theory of place in literature derived from Parks and Recreation? Why, Ploughshares blog, you’re too kind.
●
●
True Romance
“Dive bars are full of beautiful dreamers.” True or false? If you answered true, you might be a romantic. Take Daniel Handler’s quiz to determine whether you’re prone to romance or cynicism, and then plan your Valentine’s Day accordingly.
●
●
Geoff Dyer on Pagetti’s Syria
The devastating images of Syria shot by Franco Pagetti have been collected into a series entitled Veiled Aleppo. Over at The New Republic, Geoff Dyer writes about one of them. It’s an image, Dyer observes, that features “symbols … of the death throes not of a city but of film.”
●
●
Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
●
●
He Is Not Pynchon
Penguin released a book trailer for the newest Thomas Pynchon novel in which a guy in a T-shirt that reads “I’m Pynchon” stands on a rooftop on the “Yupper” West Side and talks about his life. (To find out why I used the term “Yupper,” check out the recent New York mag piece on Pynchon that I wrote about last week.)
●
●
Byron-ness
Which Lord Byron is the most Byron-y? Let Mallory Ortberg tell you in her rankings of Byron portraits.
●
●
Body Works
Alexandra Kleeman’s debut novel includes, among other discomfiting things, a series of fake advertisements for surreal women’s beauty products. The plot, which follows a proofreader named A, begins with the main character’s attempt to evade her roommate, and eventually brings A to join a “Church of Conjoined Eaters.” At Slate, Molly Fischer argues the book deftly captures our society’s weird treatment of femininity.
●
●