Michele Filgate was so terrified by Dave Eggers’s The Circle that she quit social media for a week and wrote about the experience for Salon. “I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process.” Pair with: our review of the novel.
Vicious Circle
The Modern Memoir
Recommended Reading: On the memoir, “the offspring of the slave narrative,” as a literary form from the Black tradition. Recent examples range from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Margo Jefferson to Clifford Thompson and Rosemarie Freeney.
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New Norman Rush
New Yorker book critic James Wood dropped in on our “Best of the Millennium” piece on Norman Rush’s Mortals and offered this tidbit, “I think [Rush’s] next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.”
Forty Stories
The wonderful folks at Harper Perennial are giving away a free PDF of forty short stories from the likes of Adam Wilson, Blake Butler, Roxane Gay, Kyle Minor, and many more. On July 17th, the group will also release Forty Stories as a free eBook through “all the major retailers,” too.
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‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ Turns 50
Since its publication 50 years ago, Eric Carle's classic picture book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has been translated into more than 62 languages.
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This Writing Life
“I thought there were would be more in this writing life, an easier path to walk. I write those words and know they are the unwise thoughts of my younger self and that I am still too stubborn to give up on my dreams. When Annie Dillard invited me outside for that smoke, she knew very well what it would mean to a young writer like me. She intuited my ambitions and it was her way of encouraging me.” This essay is ostensibly about smoking cigarettes and playing catch with Annie Dillard, but it’s also about the incredibly important role that an established writer can play in helping a struggling up-and-comer.
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From the Mixed Up Files of DFW
Newsweek takes an “infinitely fascinating quest” through David Foster Wallace’s just-released archive at University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Agee; Mann; Cowley; Virgil; Szybist
Out this week: The Complete Journalism of James Agee; Straight Razor by Randall Mann; The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley; The Virgil Encyclopedia; and a new e-book edition of Incarnadine, the poetry collection by Mary Szybist that won this year’s National Book Award.
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Here is Filgate’s epiphany: “It’s better to find a balance and not think of your life as existing in 140 characters or status updates.”
Did she really need Dave Eggers to tell her that?
All of these practically religious reactions to what seems to me to be the least subtle, least profound book of the year make me feel, as someone who doesn’t use much social media, that I’ve drastically, devastatingly underestimated how much it dominates other people’s lives.
Seriously, has no one that uses social media ever considered that maybe spending five hours every day on Facebook and Twitter isn’t particularly healthy or productive?