“Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world.” In the London Review of Books, a native of San Fran laments her tech-drunk city.
Techrification
On the Family
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney introduces us to a few of literature’s dysfunctional families at Electric Literature. For a loving family relationship, check out an interview with Phillip and Lily Lopate, collaborators on Every Father’s Daughter.
Vladimir Nabokov and “divine dribble”
Following up her post about Judy Blume’s Forever, our own Lydia Kiesling writes about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita for PEN American Center’s ongoing series for Banned Books Month. It’s a book, Kiesling writes, which serves as an “exhibition of a uniquely talented person at the zenith of his powers.” (This isn’t the first time she’s discussed the book, by the way.)
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New Murakami Coming in August
Big news: It looks like Haruki Murakami’s much-anticipated new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage finally has a U.S. publication date: August 12, 2014.
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Jennifer Egan at 15
Maybe the real reason I like Jennifer Egan is that there are so many freckled protagonists in her books. Patricia Zohn at the Huffington Post asks the author about her family, parenting, and her writing obsessions (like freckled faces). She even gets a photo of Egan as a teenager!
Writerly Relations
In an interview with Big Think back in 2008, David Remnick said of Philip Roth that the writer “would have been my father had Philip Roth not been a literary intellectual but rather an orthodontist in North Jersey.” At The New Yorker’s website, Remnick eulogizes Roth’s work upon his retirement. (Keith Meatto did the same thing for us.)
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The AOL Layoff Carnage
At The Awl, a former AOL freelancer reports on the layoff carnage there in the wake of the HuffPo acquisition.