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?
I Feel Expository
If we are, as Adam Kirsch writes, in the midst of a golden age of essays, we might want to ask exactly which essays are proof of this golden age. His first three picks — My Heart is an Idiot, I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Pulphead — are unsurprising choices, but then it gets a bit more interesting when he looks at Sheila Heti’s latest novel. (You could also check out a few of our pieces on these books.)
Are Books Clutter?
When Marie Kondo's Netflix show came out, Hannah McGregor writes for Electric Literature, "the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter."
●
●
●
“The snow falls like heads of cabbage”
Recommended Reading: Short fiction entitled “Unlikely Places” by Kim Chinquee.
●
●
Bill Keller wants reporters to report and only report.
The New York Times‘ executive editor Bill Keller caused an uproar three months ago when he railed against Twitter and, specifically, how it was making us all dumb. (Or, after being challenged, was it for some other reason?) This month, he rails against his staff of reporters because they want to write books.
●
●
“The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich.”
The New Yorker has made six poems that Adrienne Rich published in the magazine available online.
●
●
Taking Risks on the Page
Over at Catapult, Idra Novey writes on how her experience as a translator changed how she approaches her own work as a novelist. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on reading Clarice Lispector in English.
●
●
List of Lengthy Books
In honor of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire (which stands at a hefty nine hundred pages), Bethanne Patrick has compiled a reading list of lengthy books at Lit Hub. You could also check out our interview with Hallberg.