On His Mistress Going to Bed
Novelistic Ambitions
David Kurnick explores what makes Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels so addictive. As he puts it, “In Ferrante we see what grand novelistic ambition looks like devoid of writerly vanity.” Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.
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Reading Rooster
There are plenty of reading apps out there, but a company called Rooster has released another, this one designed to "allow users to consume bite-sized pieces of highly curated fiction" whenever they have a few spare moments. In an interview with BookBusiness, Yael Goldstein Love, the editorial director of the project, described Rooster as aiming "to bring immersive reading, particularly fiction reading, back into busy peoples' lives." It's difficult to know how to feel about this. Of course we think busy people should read good fiction, but is this just a precursor to the inevitable change of literature in the face of growing technology and shortened attention spans?
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Foxcatcher
You’ve probably taken one of those quizzes that lets you find out the nature of your spirit animal. If so, you’ll enjoy this novel take on the form, which lets you see which animal from a famous poem you are. (For the record, this writer got Marianne Moore’s immortal fish.)
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Cruel Months
Why is it "The Waste Land" and not "The Wasteland?" Poetry investigates.
Appearing Elsewhere
Over the past week, the work of three Millions staffers has been shown off for other publications: Mark O’Connell talks Lethem, Dyer and Batuman for Slate; Emily St. John Mandel talks noir for Beyond the Margins; and Garth Risk Hallberg names his selection for this year’s Pulitzer-less Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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The Morning News Hosts Klimontovich
The Morning News continues its Reading Roulette series with Nikolai Klimontovich’s “How to Crow Your Head Off,” which “recalls 1957, when another anticipated influx of foreigners into the heart of the Soviet Union prompted ‘municipal cleansing’ measures of the human sort.”
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