Recommended: Meagan Day on Joan Didion’s essay “In the Realm of the Fisher King,” which you can find in Didion’s collection After Henry.
What Really Happened in the 1980s
Twilight Belt
What does it mean that the “Twilight Belt” so closely resembles the Bible Belt?
Tintin Ruling
Good news for Tintinologists, if not guards of political correctness: Tintin in the Congo has been deemed “not racist” by a Belgian judicial adviser.
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Kartika Review
M. Evelina Galang, author of Her Wild American Self and current director of the University of Miami’s MFA Creative Writing Program, is featured in the latest issue of Kartika Review, “a national Asian/Pacific Islander American literary arts journal.” You can read the entire Fall 2011 issue for free.
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only sell to the rich or deranged
The folks at BookRide, the blog of London’s beloved antiquarian bookstore Any Amount Books, have published a handy set of guidelines for curmudgeonly booksellers. When Kyo Maclear visited The Monkey’s Paw in Toronto, it would seem that they had yet to stumble upon this code of curmudgeonly conduct.
Thirteen Poems
Check out thirteen poems by Lydia Davis in BOMB Magazine. You could also read Adam Boffa’s piece about Davis’s work and Twitter.
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The sublime everyday
Tom Perotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers, talks about how he learned to write about ordinary life from Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. “The tragedy is that, while we’re alive, we don’t view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don’t—we can’t—value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they’ll one day be gone forever.”
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