To quote Raymond Chandler: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split.” Or, dispelling grammar myths, like not ending sentences with prepositions.
Calling All Grammar Nazis
Yugolysses
The “Yugoslavian Ulysses,” (not actually titled Yugolysses) has been newly translated into English, and gets a thoughtful but mixed review in TNR.
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The Root of Fantasy
Recommended Reading: Bret Anthony Johnston on (not) writing what you know. His essay is an excerpt of Writer’s Notebook II, published by the folks at Tin House. (Related: we published Harper’s editor Christopher Beha’s essay in the book last year.)
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No, I Matter Less!
To celebrate the release of Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, the Cabinet editors put their own magazine on trial, filling up an NYPL auditorium with academics and writers who, perhaps inevitably, began to compete in a kind of irrelevance-off. Which begs the question, answered well by The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones in Bookforum: how relevant to the wider culture is a magazine like Cabinet, anyway?
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Zen and the Art of Failing at the Tour de France
What if the Tour de France nearly ground to a halt due to fiction? Imagine the best bikers in the world reading themselves into injury. At The Morning News, our own Matt Seidel imagines the chaos, making clear what happens when professional athletes meet page-turners. You could also read Matt’s essay on Tim Krabbé’s book The Rider.
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Another View
“But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion.”
The Winds of Winter Excerpt
“Somewhere off in the far distance, a dying man was screaming for his mother.” Entertainment Weekly has the first paragraph of the next installment of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
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