Jonathan Lethem thinks his work is taken too seriously. “Well, I was just watching Richard Pryor, and he says, ‘When you’re dating a white woman, and people don’t like it, you can’t really pretend. You can’t go, “Oh, she’s not with me.”‘ ‘You write the big, ambitious books, right?’ Well, I guess they are,” he said in an interview with Salon. He also discusses being equated with Jonathan Franzen and his new novel, Dissident Gardens.
Why so Serious?
Deeper into the “Twungle”
Margaret Atwood considers her experience of Twitter and describes how the wilderness of the online world is spilling over into her physical reality.
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The Brothers Carrotmazov Was Taken
I'm not sure if you guys heard, but Elif Batuman joined Twitter a few days ago, and promptly seized the sweetest user alias on the site.
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
William Blake may have described its "green and pleasant land" but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
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Perilous Trips
“To be a Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Colin Thubron, a Norman Douglas or Paul Theroux, requires always saying yes. To not-get-raped, according to every lesson I – and so many other women – have been taught, so often requires saying no.” On the paradox of being a women and a travel writer.
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Rich Reading
At a loss for what to read? Goldman Sachs has released their reading list. “We’re talking about people who incurred $550 million in fines for schemes to turn a profit on the civilization-threatening financial crisis they themselves had helped create, and the line between genius and chutzpah is notoriously hard to draw, so, yeah, I’d like to know what’s on these folks’ bedside tables.” Our own Hannah Gersen wrote about Occupy Wall Street and Bartleby, the Scrivener.