What’s it like to have Jacques Barzun edit your first novel? Besides terrifying, of course.
In Defense of First Novels
John Cage, Silence
Don’t listen to John Cage‘s 4’33” while you read Marjorie Perloff‘s article on the 50th anniversary of Silence. It could be a distraction.
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Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?
“What [Vladimir] Nabokov is actually doing in Lolita is deliberately drawing on all manner of anti-Semitic propaganda, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nazi caricatures of the Jewish ‘type,’ to create in Humbert Humbert the anti-Semitic cliché of legend, rather as, say, Chaucer draws on medieval misogynist writings to create in the figure of the Wife of Bath the archetypal shrew of his male audience’s nightmares.”
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War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he’d never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers’. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Stories in Space
Recommended Reading: On new posters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and space travel’s place in storytelling. Dominic Smith asks why there aren’t more stories in space.
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“He’s too good-looking”
Surely you’ve heard the hype by now. Surely you’ve seen someone blushing and shifting their eyes askance while reading this book in public. Well, now you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about. You can read the beginning of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa courtesy of Dzanc Books and The Collagist.
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