New Murakami in 2014
The Personal Dilemma of Writing
Tim Parks investigates the idea of “writing to death” in the cases of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens and William Faulkner. “So many of the writers I have looked at seem permanently torn between irreconcilable positions,” Parks writes. “Eventually, the dilemma driving the work either leads to death, or is neutralized in a way that prolongs life but dulls the writing” (Bonus: Our own Mark O’Connell just reviewed Parks’s latest book, Italian Ways.)
This Isn’t Your Mother’s DoubleX
The debut issue of Candor magazine is like a Sassy for the intellectual set, rife with wit (Emily Gould and Merisa Meltzer discuss Away We Go), intelligence (writer mother Rachel Zucker and woman writer Sarah Manguso speak candidly about identity, motherhood, women’s prejudices and writing), and women’s rights (Atossa Abrahamian considers the rhetoric of the rape victim).
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Sedaris’s Story Comes to the Big Screen
After years of rebuffing film deals and movie rights offers, David Sedaris has finally allowed one of his stories to be made into a motion picture. This month, you’ll be able to check out University of Miami alum Kyle Alvarez’s adaptation of “C.O.G.” (Child of God). You can check out a trailer over here.
How Slender Man was made
Half-meme, half-myth, ‘Slender Man’ came to us from the same internet that brought LOLcat, doge, and Rule 34. After the surreal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl by two other children claiming they were acting on his behalf, this particular story has taken on a tragic resonance. In The Semiotic Review, Jeffrey Tolbert argues that Slender Man took hold because of the documentary nature of internet ‘evidence’. As one Something Awful blogger put it, “Even if we don’t really believe in [Slender Man], we are cutting him out and sewing him together. We’re stuffing him with nightmares and unspoken fears. And what happens when the pictures are no longer Photoshops?” Very meta–and very scary, all over again.
Eaten Whales
Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s a fantastic cake inspired by Moby-Dick. Apropos of whales in general, however, is this beautiful video on the disintegration of a whale carcass inspired by “Radiolab.”
We Done Good
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Their Thanksgiving(s)
“Behind the collective feast and public ritual lies a personal dimension: the holiday as each of us has lived it, laughed about it, imagined it or reinvented it.” For their “My Thanksgiving” feature, The New York Times asked nine writers — including Parul Sehgal, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Emma Cline — how they celebrate the holiday. Pair with Nguyen’s 2015 Year in Reading.