Recommended Reading: Tyler Stoddard Smith’s satirical essay on the new literary movement “The Real Newism” at Hobart. “Did Virgil go to hell? No. Did Virginia Woolf go to Disney World? No, and it turns out that Orlando isn’t a place, but a dude. And did Truman Capote ever have breakfast at Tiffany’s? Yes, but the eggs Benedict was cold and the bloody marys were ‘bullshit.'”
The Real World
After the Wall
“[Christa] Wolf was a committed dissident in the GDR (East Germany) and a forceful voice resisting Western triumphalism after reunification. It would seem like some sort of explanation was owed to the public. Yet how does one give an account of oneself when the link to the past, to the psychological and cultural backdrop of such fateful decisions, is not even subjectively available?” On City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.
“A Giant Empathy Machine”
“It may be true… that the internet will turn out to be ‘a giant empathy machine.’ And yet, as any reader knows, we’ve already had one for centuries.” Drew Calvert reviews The Novel: A Biography for the Los Angeles Review of Books and provides an argument for the novel in the digital age.
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Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd Play
“Sir Tom Stoppard has written a play for BBC Radio 2 to mark the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon featuring Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.” Huh, so it looks like Stoppard still isn’t slowing down.
Hold On
Lindsay King-Miller — she of Ask A Queer Chick — pays tribute to an old friend who died before her twenty-sixth birthday.
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The Empathy Exams
“[G]uess what, spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place.” Alex Balk at The Awl takes the piss out of recent studies that have suggested reading literary fiction might make us better people. Writer John Vaillant, whom we interviewed last year, might disagree.
From Abkhazia to Zimbabwe
“[W]e can confirm that there is no place on Earth (not even Antarctica) that literature isn’t written.” Michael Barron, the U.S. literary editor for Culture Trip, curates “The Global Anthology,” an online project showcasing more than 220 pieces of literature from all over the world written in or translated into English (via Moby Lives).
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