In 1945 and 1946, the FBI began keeping tabs on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Cold War was just around the corner, and the Bureau suspected their new targets were secretly agents of Communism. However, FBI agents who followed the French writers evolved in the course of their spying: they became, in G.K. Chesterton’s phrase, “philosophical policemen.” (h/t Slate)
Les Etrangers
Lipsyte Interviewed
Fiction Daily has added a give and take with The Ask author Sam Lipsyte to its growing collection of author interviews.
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Book ownership and education
In Salon, Laura Miller discusses two new studies showing a correlation between the number of books in a child's household and the level of education that child's likely to attain: "Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books."
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In love with the entire family
We're a little late to The Guardian's Families in Literature series, which includes essays on everyone from the March sisters to the Moomins and has been running for the last few weeks. A particular favorite is Moira Redmond's look at Brideshead Revisited's Flytes and the strange but true power of falling in love with an entire family, which pairs well with our own Lydia Kiesling's Modern Library Revue of the novel.
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The Week of Lydia Davis
If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription and can’t read Dana Goodyear’s wonderful profile of Lydia Davis, then you can at the very least check out the Can’t and Won’t author’s interview with Quarterly Conversation. Or, of course, you could just go straight to the source and mainline some of her short fiction directly.
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O Pioneer!
Audiobook fans take note: Our Millions original ebook The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes is now available from Audible.com.
Death, Sex, Money & James McBride
Recommended listening: Death, Sex & Money talks with James McBride, winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction.
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Egan On E-Readers
Jonathan Franzen isn't the only writer opposing technology and digitization. Jennifer Egan, in a panel discussion last week, compared Facebook to a "huge Soviet apartment block."
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