The story behind Le Grand Meaulnes, the neglected French classic that was beloved by Henry Miller, name-dropped by Jack Kerouac, and a potential inspiration for the title of The Great Gatsby.
The Grand Neglect
Will the Real Borges Please Stand Up?
“The thing Borges was most skeptical about was the idea of a writer, a man, named Borges.” Our own Mark O’Connell writes about Borges for The New Yorker.
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Beltway Books
Editors and critics at The Washington Post put together a sixteen-image slideshow of books “to help introduce” our nation’s capital. This seems like the perfect excuse to try out my new favorite thing on the internet: the Slideshow De-Slide-ifier by ClusterFake.
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Margaret Cho’s Advice
Margaret Cho’s advice for “hacking it?” Write what you think is funny, not what you think people will like.
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“Cultivate Lightness”
What should you do if, horror of horrors, you find yourself appearing as a character in someone else’s book? Michelle Huneven shares her experience being fictionalized in an essay for The Paris Review. Her advice? “Don’t read too much into it. Cultivate lightness.” Pair with our profile of Huneven, “Not Lost, Just Rearranged.”
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Visualizing Don Quixote
Visual Editions wants to send photographer Jacob Robinson to La Mancha… by way of camper van. Along the way, he’ll be tasked with “captur[ing] the spirit of Don Quixote” on film and combining his shots with text from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in order to create a re-imagined, “faithful and contemporary” edition. You can find out more on the effort’s Kickstarter page.
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Speaking with Whitehead
Colson Whitehead sits down with Boris Kachka at Vulture to discuss The Underground Railroad, Ferguson, and coming of age in New York City. You could also read our review of Whitehead’s Zone One.
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Big Picture
The cartoonist Joe Sacco has a new graphic novel out that uses a twenty-four-foot panorama to depict the first day of the Battle of the Somme. At Salon, Sacco tells Daniel D’Addario that his upbringing in Australia, where the landings at Gallipoli have great patriotic significance, helped to spur his interest in the War to End All Wars. (Related: we interviewed Sacco last year.)
Leave Elena Alone
We can’t stop gobbling up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but we also won’t stop asking who Elena Ferrante really is. Why do we need to know the author’s true identity, asks Electric Literature? (Our own Michael Schaub revealed that he was Elena Ferrante earlier this year.)
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