Walter White is the new Walt Whitman. “Both are intellectual pioneers in their fields, their legacies—centuries apart—demanding risk, casting them outside of society, gliding out into the world, liberated from societal constraints,” Kera Bolonik writes about Whitman’s influence on Breaking Bad.
The Song of the Two Walts
Georges Perec also remembers
George Perec's I Remember, a series of aphoristic memories modeled after Joe Brainard's volume of the same name, are finally making their way into English translation. The Paris Review has an excerpt. "I remember that Stendhal liked spinach... I remember that one of the first decisions that de Gaulle took on coming to power was to abolish the belt worn with jackets in the military."
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Moscow Fact Check
The political unrest in Moscow is significant and worth covering, but it's important to verify the facts. Over the weekend, a picture of an enormous crowd went viral, and it was billed as an image of anti-Putin demonstrations. This is not true. The image is actually from a 1991 rally in which protesters called for Mikhail Gorbachev's resignation. It even appears in this Atlantic article from December, 2011.
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Touring The Third Hotel
"I thought quite a lot about the vocabulary of tourism, the kinds of desires that vocabulary seems designed to ignite, and the promises made, and how those promises change or vanish altogether depending on who you are." The Paris Review interviews Laura van den Berg about writing, tourism, and her new novel, The Third Hotel. From our archives: our 2015 interview with van den Berg.
Tales of a Onetime Construction Worker
Last week, Emily Gould recommended Nell Zink in her Year of Reading piece, extolling Zink's novel The Wallcreepers as a “funny, profane, [and] deeply weird book.” At The Paris Review Daily, Matthew Jakubowski interviews the author, who talks about living in Germany, reading too much Kafka and writing for Jonathan Franzen.
NowTrends Now Digital
Karl Taro Greenfeld's story collection, NowTrends, is out this week. For a sample of Greenfeld's writing, I recommend checking out "Tincture — Part One" at Five Chapters. It's also worth noting that several other Short Flight / Long Drive books, such as Adam Novy's excellent Avian Gospels, are now available as e-books for the first time.
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