Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books published their first issue.
Culture Club
Take a Look at Cormac McCarthy’s Screenplay
The New Yorker has a sneak peek at some scenes Cormac McCarthy wrote for the forthcoming Ridley Scott film, The Counsellor.
Across the Screen
“His books are not only obviously produced by an obsessive film buff (as evidenced by one wry recurring trick, the dates in brackets that follow even citations of celluloid ephemera), they often seem to want to be movies, as shown by another signature device, the way his protagonists – from the 1890s European spies and 1950s New Yorkers in the interwoven narratives of his debut, V. in 1963, all the way to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge in 2013 – break anti-naturalistically into song like characters in musicals.” An argument that Thomas Pynchon writes fiction tailor-made for the cinema.
On the Scroll
“Was Jack Kerouac really a hack?” To quote Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Though not all writers agree.
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Selling Point
“The uncanny—not truth, beauty, or goodness—is literature’s boon.” The good thing about literature: it makes you weird.
The Thrill of Writing Prose
Bookforum interviewed Garth Greenwell about the queer tradition of autofiction, the impulse to write fiction, and the thrill of surprising oneself. Also check out this Millions review of Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You.
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