In 2011 I wrote about a group of Chilean Communists who wished to exhume Pablo Neruda’s body. They alleged that Neruda was murdered. Now, two years later, a judge has ordered the corpse to be exhumed and autopsied in order to set the record straight.
Pablo Neruda’s Body to be Exhumed
Does This Mean Lewis Lapham is Morpheus?
Picador’s Gabrielle Gantz is holding monthly conversations with bloggers, and she posts the results on the publishing house’s fantastic Tumblr. Here she interviews Aidan Flax-Clark, associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and gets him to discuss the similarities between his research and The Matrix.
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New André 3000 on the way
The possibility of a new André 3000 solo album (even if it’s “no sure thing”) is liable to make this writer giddy. Fun Fact: In a print-only interview with Oxford American, National Book Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward nominated Three Stacks as “the most underrated Southern writer.” (And she’s a fan of his collaborations with Frank Ocean, too.) You shouldn’t have needed an endorsement, but if you did, then that should be good enough for you.
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Fifty Shades of Late Capitalism
“Fifty Shades of Grey follows this long history of class ascendancy via feminine wiles, but does so cleverly disguised as an edgy modern bodice-ripper,” writes Heather Havrilesky in the latest issue of The Baffler. Throughout the piece, Havrilesky explores the way luxury brand fetishism and conspicuous consumption fueled E.L. James’s “female-friendly” pornography phenomenon
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How They Did It Before Sears
The more you know! In Victorian times, sitting for a photograph could last hours due to primitive camera technology and the need for long, long exposures. This, predictably, didn’t jibe with kids, and so parents had to adopt an ingenious workaround: disguising themselves in the picture so they could physically restrain the youngsters. (Don’t miss Part 2, either.)
Get Excited For The Belmont!
I’ll Have Another scratched from the Belmont yesterday, which dashed our hopes of seeing the first Triple Crown winner since 1978, but you can still get excited for today’s race by checking out this beautiful passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood-Horses.
Hedging Against Future Risk
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow.
Preview of It Chooses You
To celebrate the printing of Miranda July’s It Chooses You in paperback McSweeney’s is offering a free excerpt from the book. Also see our brief review of It Chooses You and the excellent Onion article wondering what July’s whole “thing” is, anyways.
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That Moment When
“I can still remember with complete clarity the way I felt when whatever it was came fluttering down into my hands that day 30 years ago on the grass behind the outfield fence at Jingu Stadium; and I recall just as clearly the warmth of the wounded pigeon I picked up in those same hands that spring afternoon a year later, near Sendagaya Elementary School. I always call up those sensations whenever I think about what it means to write a novel.” Haruki Murakami on “The Moment [He] Became a Novelist,” excerpted on Lit Hub from the new double edition of his first novels, Wind/Pinball.
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