Recommended Reading: Dean Young’s poem “Why I Haven’t ‘Outgrown Surrealism,’ No Matter What That Moron Reviewer Wrote” for Plume.
The Surreal World
Recession, Eh? Not Up Here
The oil boom occurring in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada’s Bakken Formation is so frantic right now that ND’s unemployment rate is only 3.4%, the lowest in the nation. “Hiring is so frantic,” writes Business Week‘s Bryan Gruley, “the McDonald’s in Dickinson [North Dakota] is offering $300 signing bonuses.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Thompson, Stephenson, Adiga, McGinniss, Silverstein
New this week: Craig Thompson’s long-awated follow up to Blankets is here. Stay tuned for our review of Habibi later this week. Also new: Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, Joe McGinniss’s much leaked exposé The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, and a new, posthumous collection of Shel Silverstein’s poetry and drawings, Every Thing On It.
Stumped and Delighted
This fantastic essay from The Rumpus argues for the abandonment of realism in American fiction. Charles Finch wrote an essay for The Millions on the truce between realism and fabulism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that pairs quite nicely.
Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction.” Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
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Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
Writing About Oneself
Recommended Reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti discuss literary ambition and the price of success.
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Beautiful poem, thank you for passing it along.