The US Navy will no longer write its internal communiques in all caps. Maybe they got tired of the sense that they were constantly shouting?
NO MORE
After the Dawn
In 1958, the Indian writer Yashpal published the first installment of This Is Not that Dawn, an eleven-hundred-page novel and feminist epic written in Hindi. The book presages many of the biggest controversies affecting India today. At Page-Turner, Karan Mahajan reads the novel, explaining why he believes it to be “the greatest long novel about India.” Related: Mythilo G. Rao pays a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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New Rooms
Roald Dahl’s estate has released a 1961 draft chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The draft reveals a number of little-known characters the author later excised from the book. It also reveals that, at one point, the story featured as many as 10 golden tickets. The Guardian has the draft chapter in full.
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There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
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Civic Duty
Claudia Rankine’s new book of poetry, Citizen, is getting a lot of attention in part due to its meditations on race in modern America. In the latest issue of BOMB, Lauren Berlant interviews the poet, asking her about micro-aggressions, Kara Walker and the implicit tone of the word “citizen.”
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Abandonment Issues
We give up a book for many reasons: it was too long, the writing was dull, it was written by E.L. James. Goodreads has charted just when and why we abandon books. Catch-22 is the number one abandoned book. (Confession: I didn’t finish it either.) Also, see our article on the pressures of finishing novels in the age of literary social media.
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Born Weird
Meet the man who calls his own fans “scum,” R. Crumb. Crumb first rose to prominence after the 1968 debut of Zap Comix, the first of the majorly successful “underground comix” publications. His work with legendary poet Charles Bukowski is worth taking a look.
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Needs More Pigs
The archives of the British Library have been digitized, and among many other gems is this rejection of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by none other than T.S. Eliot, himself: “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
Unpublished DFW
This previously unpublished David Foster Wallace story, likely an excerpt from the Pale King manuscript, circulated as samizdat a couple of years back, but its reappearance – this time on some guy’s tumblr page – is a good excuse to link to it.