As Der Spiegel bluntly puts it, when Jean-Paul Sartre met up with the head of the RAF, a German terrorist group, he tried to use his powers “to persuade them to stop murdering people.”
No Exit
Seems About Right
“Post-truth” has been named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries, reports The Guardian. Considered an adjective, its definition is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The Dictionaries report its first use in 1992 by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in relation to Iran-Contra and the first Gulf War. And we thought Colbert’s “truthiness” was funny.
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G to the Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann’s much-delayed Great Gatsby film adaptation may justify its long post-production schedule after all. In an announcement this past week, it was made clear that Jay-Z is “composing the upcoming film’s original score.” The film’s latest trailer can be found here.
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America the Beautiful in Books
“Now I wrote until near dawn, wanting a map of the literary nation, a beautiful evocation of how we are truly a nation of village and city and prairie and brownstone, of Rockies and bayous and mesas. Novels give to every reader someone else’s home. Can we not see this – we of wonder and grievance?” Susan Straight creates a map of America in 737 novels, prompting us to remember the perennial literary question: What is the greatest American novel?
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Between the Pages, Between the Sheets
Attention promiscuous literary types, the September issue of Bookslut is now online.
“Nothing about that day was his plan.”
The Guardian has a new story by Hilary Mantel up on its website. (In case you missed it: the author won a second Man Booker prize.)