Max Linsky interviewed Riddle of the Labyrinth author Margalit Fox about the other career she’s had for eight years: obituary writing. Fox remarks on how obituaries have grown from being “the bastard stepchild of American journalism” into “the best gig” in the entire industry. Here’s one of my favorite Fox obituaries, by the way.
Margalit Fox Talks Obituaries
Fail Again
Having kicked off his career with a book of poetry, it’s not surprising that Ben Lerner is interested in the late Johns Hopkins professor Allen Grossman, who theorized that people dislike poetry because poems are — by definition — failures. In a piece for the LRB, he runs through the implications of Grossman’s theory, touching on poets as disparate as Shakespeare and William McGonagall. Pair with Kate Angus on why Americans don’t buy poetry books.
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On designing a Frankenbook
App designer and lit lover Dave Morris blogs about making an interactive app for retelling Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the differences between video games and interactive reading.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Barrett; Gurganus; Levy; Vann; Beatty; McGuane; Ishiguro
Out this week: Young Skins by Colin Barrett; Decoy by Allan Gurganus; The Unloved by Deborah Levy; Aquarium by David Vann; The Sellout by Paul Beatty; Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s first new novel in ten years (which our own Lydia Kiesling reviewed yesterday). For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Chante, You Stay
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexander Stein takes a look at lip-syncing, gender performativity, and the greatest television show ever made, RuPaul’s Drag Race.
New Experimental Fiction
Angela Stubbs at The Nervous Breakdown examines current experimental fiction and the New Narrative movement through the work of Dodie Bellamy, Kirsten Kaschock, Julie P. Enzser and Aimee Bender.
Now That’s a Hiatus
Whenever you feel bad, remember: Tessa Hadley didn’t believe in her work for twenty years.
Science Fiction’s Race Problem
How can science fiction writers invent aliens and entire planets but not include multifaceted characters of color in their fiction? At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky discusses the genre’s equality problem and analyzes how race is viewed in everything from The Left Hand of Darkness to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. “When that future unthinkingly reproduces current inequities, it seems like both a missed opportunity and a failure of imagination.”
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