Why did Richard Brautigan’s friends eventually stop inviting him to parties? Was it because he got drunk? Was it because he brought too many friends? Or was it because, as Michael LaPointe suggests in his review of Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, he liked to pack a revolver?
The Heat-Packing Poet
The State of the State’s Libraries
The state funds for California's libraries have been dwindling for the better part of a decade, but now they face total elimination. Put into concrete terms: in the 1999-2000 fiscal year, libraries received $56.8 million from the state; in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, that number was down to $12.9 million; now they'll receive $0.
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How Many Palins Does It Take To Break Even?
Will HarperCollins sell 400,000 copies of Going Rogue? (My guess: you betcha.)
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Who You’ve Lost
This incredible essay from Rita Gabis at Guernica examines the bizarre intersection of dreams, truth, and murder. If that subject matter piques your interest, here are a few essays from The Millions that also touch on dreams, truth, and murder, respectively.
Unevenness As Virtue
"The concept that being American means, by definition, having an ideal that you’ve failed to live up to—that’s another crucial thing I learned from [James Alan] McPherson. It is not a rejection of America for Michelle Obama to note that her daughters are growing up in a house built by slaves. Or a rejection of a white writer to point out that Fitzgerald was a racist. Instead, it is American to admit those facts and to find in that admission a way forward." On American values, Barack Obama, and the legacy of James Alan McPherson over at The Literary Hub.
Dead Men May Tell Tales
"The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule." The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there's a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.
“Tough, Funny, and Sophisticated”
Sam Sacks of Open Letters Monthly offers an encomium to Pauline Kael, "one of the best movie critics - or critics of any kind - of the past century."