At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen plots famous writers on two axes: Genius to Mediocrity and Arrogance to Modesty. It may offend you (or leave you feeling satisfied) to know that Tom Wolfe is the plot’s most arrogant author.
Great to Not Great
Sounding Off
Shakespeare conspiracy theorists might still wonder who the real playwright was, but we do know what he would’ve sounded like. Linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate the original pronunciation of the Bard’s best. Bonus: An interview with Ben on the research behind the pronunciation.
Wrecked Modern Romance
“[Virginie] Despentes has become a kind of cult hero, a patron saint to invisible women: the monstrous and marginalized, the sodden, weary and wildly unemployable, the kind of woman who can scarcely be propped up let alone persuaded to lean in.” On Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie and French feminist pulp that pulls no punches.
Emily St. John Mandel on Outrider
Our own Emily St. John Mandel dropped by the Outrider podcast to talk about Australian literary festivals (among other things).
●
●
Nothing Has to Be Blown Up
“One of the joys of literature is that we can always push back against established ways of speaking and seeing—and nothing has to be blown up.” Mark Z. Danielewski, whose latest novel, the first installment of a 27-book series called The Familiar, has just been released, writes for The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series about “signiconic” writing, the orneriness of his work and the graphic novel Here. Pair with our 2012 interview with Danielewski.
Some Solutions
Over at the Literary Hub, Helen Phillips and Matthew Vollmer talk about the short story as a form. Pair with Paul Vidich’s Millions piece about the future of the short story.
“Global” or “World Literature” vs. Internationalism
The success of international authors like Orhan Pamuk, Ma Jian, Haruki Murakami, and Tash Aw – each capable of “transcend[ing] their homelands and emerg[ing] into a planetary system where there work can acquire a universal relevance” – has caught the attention of n+1’s editors. In a lengthy piece from their last issue, they suggest that we should be less concerned with such examples of “World” or “Global Literature,” and instead focused on more diverse, politically-charged and unique international works. “Global Lit tends to accept as given the tastes of an international middlebrow audience; internationalism, by contrast, seeks to create the taste by which it is to be enjoyed,” they argue.
●
●