While researching In Cold Blood, Truman Capote took pains to get the story right, so much so that the final product was, he claimed, “immacutely factual.” The tale of his labors is so well-known that Bennett Miller used it as the basis of his movie Capote. So when allegations surface that the author made deliberate errors, the story gets a little bit… awkward.
Putting the Fiction in Nonfiction
Voices in Asian-Anglophone Fiction
This week in the New Yorker Jane Hu analyzes the “dispassionate first-person narrators” prominent in works by English-speaking Asian authors and questions whether that makes it easier to identify with the narrator. She uses Chemistry by NBA 5 under 35 honoree Weike Wang as an example along with other recent works. “Against this tradition, there is, perhaps, another emerging, of Asian-Anglophone writers who both play with and thus begin to undo these tropes of Asian impersonality. The novels by Ishiguro, Park, Lin, and Wang all feature first-person narrators who keep their distance—actively denying readers direct interior access. This is true, it’s important to note, even when the characters they write are not themselves Asian.”
Kids These Days
“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.
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Using Faulkner
Glen David Gold encourages young writers to “cultivate literary friendships”, but he’d like to add one thing: “for Christ’s sake, do not let them become transactional.”
Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Novel
Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news today that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. Charles said the news was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time.
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Read Your Octopus
Recommended Reading: Octopus Magazine, Issue 15. It features poetry from Jason Koo, Daniela Olszewska, and Kathryn Donohue.
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Needs More Pigs
The archives of the British Library have been digitized, and among many other gems is this rejection of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by none other than T.S. Eliot, himself: “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
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So wait, the really rich are getting richer and richer?
There was an interesting piece on the intangible economics of fine art in this weekend’s NYT Magazine that explains the difference between the markets for art and other luxury goods (like gold and property): “Because the art market isn’t regulated like financial securities, insider dealing is generally not illegal.”
Wide Sargasso Theory
This year, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle for their groundbreaking The Madwoman in the Attic.
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