Following the example of Flaubert, whose Dictionary of Received Ideas compiled the clichés of its day, Teju Cole set out on Monday to record his own clichés on Twitter. At Page-Turner, he sums up his experiment in a blog post. (You may recall that this is not the first time Cole has won acclaim for his Twitter account.)
“Stupidity stalks us all”
Cringe-Inducing Books & Growing Up
Two off-site appearances in as many months from our otherwise relatively reclusive editor, C. Max Magee? And both times invoking the theme of lost adolescence? Something's afoot! Last month, Max dropped by The Morning News' booth for the Tournament of Books' zombie round, and now he's joining a star-studded cast at The Awl to answer the question, "What Books Make You Cringe To Remember?"
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Lolita, Cover Girl
Lolita has been, for decades, a great inspiration to cover designers, and all those great covers inspired architect John Bertram to hold his own cover design contest to see who could best re-imagine Nabokov's classic. The resulting competition has now inspired a book, coming in August, with a cover by designers Sulki & Min that references a letter Nabokov sent to his American publisher, Walter J. Minton of Putnam, in April 1959 about the cover design for Lolita. "I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering." More: An interview with Bertram.
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“It’s a process that doesn’t stop.”
An in depth interview with Chris Andrews on the subject of translating Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.
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What Should Be ‘Forbid’
"On closer inspection, however, the book comes off as something more complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination. Its elaborate descriptions of pleasure given and taken start to seem like scrims for a moral argument about what sorts of sexual behaviors should be 'forbid' and which should be encouraged—an argument refined in prison by an author deeply occupied with thoughts of punishment, dissipation, and sin." On John Cleland's (very erotic) novel Fanny Hill and the importance of its having been written in prison.
I’d Like to Thank…
"It is not, however, fashionable to love acknowledgments, and for good reason: Most of them are numbingly predictable in their architecture, little Levittowns of gratitude." In her last piece for The New York Times as a daily book critic, Jennifer Senior writes about her unabashed love for acknowledgements in books. From our archives: Henriette Lazaridis's essay on the same topic.
Not Like Us
Recommended Reading: David Shewan on racism in modern Britain.
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