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
Dr. Seuss and The Very Bad Influence
Add this to the list of incredible things you didn’t know you needed until now. At Quartz, Jenni Avins reads through a selection of hand-typed book reviews, found in the NYPL’s archives, in which librarians tear apart children’s books they find objectionable. Sample quote, from a review of Green Eggs and Ham: “There must be better ways of teaching a child to read than this.”
Convention for the Bookish
Miss this year’s AWP? The New Yorker has published a brief write-up of the conference, just to make you jealous.
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Going Against the Current
Emily Harnett writes about Elena Ferrante’s bad book covers and how it embraces “women’s fiction” as a genre. As she puts it, “In a literary marketplace where the very image of a woman is seen as antithetical to literature, Ferrante’s covers take an important stand.” Pair with Cora Currier’s essay on reading Italy through Ferrante’s books.
The Bolshoi is Back
If consecutive profiles in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books are any indication, the reopening of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre is a very big deal. To celebrate from the comfort of your chair, however, you can listen to the overture from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s opera The Voyevoda, which opened in the Bolshoi in 1869.
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One-Night Reads
“Ever since, I have added a new layer of rules for my casual sex partners, especially when I end up in their space: I ask them for a book prior to exiting. I might phrase it more diplomatically, saying ‘I just want to read something on my train-ride back,’ or ‘I just finished my last book and I have been looking for the next one.’ Via this simple action I can estimate a lot more on a broad scale of very personal information and variation of taste than what I could possibly collect through hours of post-coital, emotional interrogation.” Seven books Elias Tezapsidis acquired through casual sex.
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Jay-Z and Michiko K.: Kindred Spirits
Michiko Kakutani‘s generous and oddly moving review of Jay-Z‘s Decoded – in which she seems to find a kindred spirit – almost makes me want to take back all the mean things I’ve said about her. I still don’t trust her judgment, but the review’s worth reading just for the mental image of her in big headphones, nodding along to “Streets Is Watching.” Go ‘head, shorty.
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Zadie Smith on Charity
“But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it.” Zadie Smith has a short essay in the New Yorker on the trials of lending money to a friend.
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