To commemorate publication of the 65th anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, New Directions has asked ten contemporary writers to “create new exercises in homage to Queneau.” Over at The Rumpus, you can check out Jonathan Lethem’s “Cyberpunk” exercise, as well as one of Queneau’s twenty eight “never before translated” exercises making its English debut in the new edition. Bonus: read our own Mark O’Connell on the “radical claims about the relationship between form and content” in Queneau’s writing.
Much Ado about Queneau
Fuck Yeah, NYRB
Who says publishers have weak brands? Someone loves the NYRB Classics so much they started a Tumblr blog about them. It is called, appropriately, Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics!
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****!
Oh, shit: looks like many of our curse words are quickly going extinct. (There is good news, however, contained in this delightful sentence: “Still, according to Sheidlower, f-bomb enthusiasts need not fret too much.”)
Turkish … Delight?
C.S. Lewis’s greatest fiction of all time was convincing American children that turkish delight was going to taste good. Here are a couple pieces on food and writing to sate your unjustly titillated appetite.
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The Via Crucis of the Book
“All of a sudden, things that should be banal, like a person’s face—the fact that a person has a face—becomes extremely disorienting. In these moments, I think it’s important to keep those strange commas.” In an illuminating interview for Asymptote, Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson talks about the thrills and challenges in translating The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions review of the collection.
Bad Men
Over at Salon, Matt Zoller Seitz talks about his new book Mad Men Carousel and why audiences felt such a profound attachment to the protagonists. Despite their flaws, Seitz argues that it is the consistency in their behavior that endeared us to characters like Don and Betty, literal misfits though they were. Still having trouble admitting the show is over? This may help.
Library Buys Poet’s 40000 Emails
The British Library has paid £32,000 for poet Wendy Cope‘s email archive. A far cry from stacks of personal letters, but seemingly the natural progression of things. According to Cope herself, many of the emails “are not interesting at all”. (via @BookBench)
Literature and Commerce
The Rumpus points out that both it and HTML Giant are experimenting with ads. I was also noticing recently that several enterprising literary magazines – including The Paris Review and Canteen have been advertising on Google. (You can buy ads on The Millions too.)