Where did Modernism come from? Did it spring from the alienation engendered by the nineteenth century? Or did it spring instead from — as Hannah Sullivan argues in her new book, The Work of Revision — the typewriter?
Clickity Clack
Story from Lucia Berlin
Recommended Reading: “The Musical Vanity Boxes” by Lucia Berlin at Electric Literature.
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Kanye & The Frankfurt School
Alex Ross writes for The New Yorker about Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and modern pop culture. Jay-Z and Kanye come up, as does Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (which we've written about here and here) and Virginia Woolf's The Waves.
Van Doren’s Shakespeare Giveaway
Trevor Berrett, the man behind The Mookse and the Gripes, and now The Worlds and Works of Shakespeare, is conducting a giveaway for the NYRB Classics edition of Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare. Conditions to enter are enumerated on his blog, which you should certainly bookmark if you’re a fan of the Bard.
Introducing Literary Hub
Introducing a new literary site: Electric Literature and Grove Atlantic have combined forces to create Literary Hub, a site that will collect bookish news and articles from around the web.
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Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction." Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
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(Not So) Great Expectations
According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans are reading fewer books than they were back in 2014. A whopping twenty-eight percent of those surveyed reported not having finished even a single book in the past year, though the average number of books read per person last year remained at fourteen. For a little more in moderation lit, here’s an essay from The Millions on reading fewer books.
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On The Notebook
"The notebook is where our interior world makes contact with our exterior world; where our instinct for creation is first made material. Our notebooks are our first messy attempts at self-expression, and the ways in which we express ourselves are changing every day." Sarah Gerard explores the life of the notebook in an essay for Hazlitt. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen's look at other methods writers use to keep their ideas straight, from calendars to collages.
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