Hot on the heels of our own review of Brief Encounters with the Enemy, Full-Stop publishes an interview with Saïd Sayrafiezadeh. What makes it especially interesting, however, is that their interviewer is Scott Cheshire, who also wrote our review.
Brief Encounters with Sayrafiezadeh
Zero Percent
Feeling a bit too happy lately? Want to be utterly bummed out? Then read through this assortment of depressing graphs, provided by Rebecca Makkai. They include graphs about MFAs, a bar graph about book clubs, and a pie chart expressing the probability that you are Alice Munro.
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Just Lie Down
“Will excessive drinking unleash your creative energy? Who can say?” Over at The Toast, intrepid cataloger Ren Arcamone has compiled a list of things you could be doing instead of writing your thesis. Go read it instead of writing your thesis. Continue the stay of essay execution and check out Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious (and helpful) guide to some common signs that you might be dying in a Victorian novel.
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Rewarding Attention
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova meditates on attention and the works of Simone Weil, among them Gravity and Grace. Popova writes that Weil “wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.”
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Our Correspondent
As a poet, historian, critic, translator and editor of The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley was a genuine literary polymath, which is why it’s not surprising that he wrote eloquent letters. In one, for example, he described Larry McMurtry, who Cowley taught when McMurtry was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as a “wild young man from Texas, expert in pornography.” In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews The Long Voyage, a new collection of Cowley’s letters.
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On Lispector’s Humanity
“If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some freedom or be fully alert to their fate in a time short enough for one of her stories to be enacted.” Colm Tóibín writes about Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories. You could also check out a Year in Reading by Katrina Dodson, translator of the collection and our review of the book.
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Decenter and Frisk
According to Gilles Deleuze, “the lives of philosophers are rarely interesting.” This may have come as a surprise to Jacques Derrida, who once spent a couple days in jail after cops in the Prague airport tried to frame him for smuggling weed. (This incident gets ample coverage in a new biography of the scholar).
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Gary Shteyngart’s Book Trailer
This “book trailer” released by Gary Shteyngart for his upcoming book Super Sad True Love Story has been the cause of much recent hilarity. If you have yet to see it, look for appearances by Jeffrey Eugenides, Jay McInerney and actor James Franco.
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