“In the aftermath of tragedies, people become obsessive, do strange things. As the tragedy recedes and is sewn up into the past, these strange things appear increasingly weird to casual observers.” At The Rumpus, our own Lydia Kiesling reviews Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch, which centers around a fictional bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Some very tony shop”
False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. "If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers," she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
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Electric Lit interviews Patricia Lockwood
Electric Literature has a fantastic interview with "viral poet" Patricia Lockwood, author of "Rape Joke," new book Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, and this prophecy: "We’re going to have something in the future that is so much more revealing than tit pics, and we don’t even know what it is yet." Pair with: today's new Millions piece on publishers' struggle to turn the love of poetry into poetry sales.
Steady As She Goes
"I prefer ... to believe, in the weird and sometimes happy accidents that result—in this case—in kissing a beautiful stranger in the rain. It didn’t really change anything, but it wasn’t trivial. It was one of those encounters that rises up out of nowhere and sinks back into it, giving off light and energy as it goes." Kim Addonizio's new addition to Guernica's "The Kiss" series is fantastic and life-affirming.
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“You can’t be up the reader’s ass, as many a writer I think is—cute as hell, ingratiating as hell.”
The best longread you're likely to find this afternoon: Martin Amis talks to David Wallace-Wells about his latest novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, America's decline, politics, porn, post-modernism and more. Amis even dodges another attempt to bring up that book he wrote about videogames that nobody will let him live down.
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