Don’t expect to hear from Alan Moore anytime soon. He is withdrawing from public life after accusations that his comics include racist characters and too much sexual violence toward women according to an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid. He also took the opportunity to disparage society’s obsession with superheroes, which probably won’t win him any more fans. “To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence.”
Blame the Superheroes
‘1984’ in 2019
George Packer asks what 1984 means in today's America, and explains why Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning.
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Candlepin Bowling with Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken discusses her new novel, Bowlaway, with Ann Patchett in a new interview for Patchett's bookstore, Parnassus Books.
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Place Your Bids
“I’ve learnt so much from this profound novelist about nuance, understatement, technique.” Eighteen handwritten homages to Jane Austen by well-known writers are up for auction until tomorrow. Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, and Ian McEwan are among the authors whose tributes will raise funds for the Royal Society of Literature, reports The Guardian. And read our interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, whose most-recent novel Eligible is the ultimate literary tribute, an adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
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How to Be
If you were never satisfied with Hamlet’s answer to the famous “to be or not to be?” question, now is your chance to change it. Ryan North rewrote Hamlet as a choose-your-own-adventure book, To Be or Not To Be. You can play as Ophelia, Hamlet, or King Hamlet and choose from more than 110 alternate deaths. Brain Pickings got a first look at some of the book’s excellent illustrations.
Litterae Publicae
Azar Nafisi thinks the best way to pin down a culture is to take a look at its canonical works of literature. In The Republic of Imagination, as Adam Begley details in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, she examines a few of America’s classic novels, including Babbitt, Huck Finn and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book for The Millions.
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Small Fish
Over at The Guardian, Kevin Duffy argues that small presses do the heavy lifting in the publishing world. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.
Withdrawing IS retreating.
Moore has “withdrawn” from interviews and the comics biz before. (Remember when he was going off to be a magician?) He’s too prolix for this to last.