This Valentine’s Day, break out the Barthes and let critical theory decide the shape and scope of your sweet nothings.
A Lover’s Discourse
Tuesday New Release Day: Boyle, Marai, Baseball
New this week in the fiction aisle are T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done (our review) and Sandor Marai’s Portraits of a Marriage. Also, baseball fans, the 2011 Prospectus is out today.
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Twerking with Morgan Freeman
You might have heard that “twerk” (among other words) has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. But you probably didn’t hear Morgan Freeman reading the definition aloud.
The Reading Habits of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein
Parisian bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company is digitizing decades of its records, revealing the reading habits of its famous patrons.
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You Choose It, It Chooses You
Recommended Reading: This essay by Melissa Febos which won the 2015 Center for Women Writers Prize in Creative Nonfiction. We’ve previously mentioned Febos’s work in a couple of essays about New York writers.
Yea or Nay
In the mid-90s, David Foster Wallace published a scathing review of a John Updike novel, Toward the End of Time, that became a key text for critics of the celebrated author. Now, at The New Republic, David Baddiel argues that Updike gets a bad rap, while Jeffrey Meyers backs up DFW’s position. It might also be a good time to read James Santel’s review of Updike’s Collected Stories.