Recommended Reading: Tony Kushner’s recent speech at the Whiting Writers’ Awards.
Failing Upwards
Kafka’s Dogs
Recommended Reading: On the subject of dogs in Kafka’s works at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Our own Matt Seidel rereads The Metamorphosis in different places, letting his setting shape the reading of the text.
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Allen Ginsberg, Beat Historian
“It’s not often one gets the opportunity to take a course on a major literary movement taught by a founding member of that movement,” but Allen Ginsberg‘s lectures on “the literary history of the Beats” are now available online via Open Culture.
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In Other Words, All of America
Would you prefer to live in a city designed around parking, or a city designed around food?
Yiyun Li and the Extraordinary World of ‘War and Peace’
Yiyun Li revisits Tolstoy's War and Peace and reflects on the many ways it continues to resonate throughout generations.
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On Doormats and Shoes
At Page-Turner, our own Mark O’Connell notes “a thrilling obscenity” in the works of Gonçalo M. Tavares, a Portuguese writer whose recent novel, Jerusalem, depicts a character with schizophrenia. A lesser-known symptom of the illness, apparently, is a tendency to treat inanimate objects like conscious (and social) beings. (We wrote about Tavares back in March.)