“How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg writes some great jokes to use at your next cocktail party.
Joke’s On You
“Poetry is like a pinch, a twist of the skin”
Our own Nick Ripatrazone has been on a roll lately. Apart from the many articles he’s written for The Millions, he’s got a forthcoming collection of short fiction that includes works he published in Esquire and The Kenyon Review. He also published a new poem, “South Africa, 1988,” at The Nervous Breakdown, which you can read in conjunction with his self-interview.
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Charles Darwin’s Interest in “Neuropsychiatric Photography”
In the late 1860s, James Crichton-Browne, director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, gave Charles Darwin a collection of photographic portraits depicting the “afflicted and insane.” What followed was a six-year relationship in which both men corresponded about “the physical manifestations of natural selection.”
Yes.
Your dandruff falls like the fixtures within a scenic railway passing through a thousand bearded rainbows… Compliment courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator! (Via.)
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I Worry That I Don’t Have a Title Yet
“I worry that people in the city where the novel is based will take issue, all kinds of issue, with it. I worry that readers will be like who cares.” Here are all the things you should be worried about while working on a novel, helpfully brought to light by Susannah Felts at The Literary Hub.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Crummey; Beauman; Yan; Wisniewski; Kapoor; Galera; Hulse; Hooper; Greenberg; Whitehouse
Out this week: Sweetland by Michael Crummey; Glow by Ned Beauman; Frog by the Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski; A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor; Blood-Drenched Beard by Daniel Galera; Black River by S.M. Hulse; Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper; My Father’s Wives by the ESPN host Mike Greenberg; and Mobile Library by David Whitehouse. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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Good Ol’ USA Trilogy
“While the revolutionary milieu that was the source of many of the book’s events may have vanished, we have our own milieu.” At The Rumpus, Will Augerot re-evaluates John Dos Passos’s The USA Trilogy. He concludes that Dos Passos is more relevant than ever. Pair with: Our essay on the polyphonic novel.
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Oh my gosh, too funny…… Re: “How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg writes some great jokes to use at your next cocktail party.”
OK, here’s mine:
From his corner at the repurposed-wood bar, he sneers at the sound of bad prose. The trace of a smile graces his lips. Give up, old man, give up, let the young buck plow the field!! He peruses the barmaid. Eureka! The perfect phrase at last…. “Her legs were supple but marred by blue-ropey veins…” He would show it to her later that night when he picked up the chapbook she just typed for him.
The End
Maureen Murphy
(Scourge of the Hipster Doufus)
Washington DC