If, while sitting in a writing class, you’ve ever looked around at your classmates and thought, “Dear Lord, these people are navel-gazers,” you might want to know that British researchers have found evidence that you were right.
I’m the Best One Here
Color Lines
At Bookforum, Alexander Benaim reads the latest novel by Jess Row, which I wrote about as part of our most recent book preview. The novel poses a charged, intriguing question: what would happen if it were possible to change your race? (It might also be a good time to read the author’s Year in Reading entry along with our own Mark O’Connell’s review of the novel at Slate.)
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This Glorious Respite
“It is now, at this precise moment when I become woefully aware of the cruel transience of this seasonal offering, rarely lingering beyond the Marigold blooms of latter March, and at once I am lost amidst a magnificent vision, one in which our hallowed Saint Patrick himself is riding shotgun alongside me in this very Camry.” In which James Joyce orders a shamrock milkshake.
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Nabokov’s Unpublished Letters
Nearly 300 previously unpublished love letters written by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera Slonim from 1923 to 1975 will be published next year by Knopf.
Draw Hard
Harold and the Purple Crayon is a classic children’s book. Is it also a writing guide? In an essay for Bookslut, Mairead Case explains why she re-reads it whenever she’s finishing a project: the main character’s need to create a room for himself is a corollary to the writing process.
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One Of Us, One Of Us
“But even among its peers, Louie is an outlier. It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club…we are living in the iGeneration, in which the self is projected back toward the world via social media. But whereas many Americans weave their public personas from curated chains of cultural signifiers — think of the popular web platform tumblr, where users ‘express themselves’ by posting digital reproductions of existing images — [Louis] C.K. aims for something more penetrating, a filmic representation of his own psyche,” claims the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Bernardine Evaristo Thanks the Stage
Bernardine Evaristo pays tribute to a youth spent in the theater and credits acting with starting her career in the arts.
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Heineken Price is Going to Double
“A classic hustler and survivor … a type who never starts revolutions but who always figures out how to benefit from whatever the New Order is.” Some dispatches from a punk tour of the Balkans by Franz Nicolay, who may or may not be an asshole, big time.
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