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
Apocalypse Patriots
In The New Statesman, Ben Marcus wonders why American writers are so obsessed with the apocalypse. (A sentiment a few others have wondered of late, too.)
An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
“How enterprising of you”
A couple weeks ago, I recommended that budding Randians read this self-edifying excerpt, taken from Ayn Rand’s version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now, Rand has penned her own version of You’ve Got Mail, again kindly published by Mallory Ortberg.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Sacks; Hitchens; Li; Whitman
Out this week: Gratitude by Oliver Sacks; And Yet by Christopher Hitchens; The Lost Garden by Ang Li; and a new edition of Drum Taps: The Complete Civil War Poems by Walt Whitman. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Addressing the Spider
Recommended Reading: J. M. Tyree’s new story at Guernica. “There’s a man on the bus sitting directly in front of you. He has a small brown spider crawling across his red shirt, near his left shoulder blade.” You could also watch our episode of The Book Report on Our Secret Life in the Movies by Tyree and Michael McGriff.
Tuesday New Release Day: Haruf; Johnson; Bacigalupi; Nichols; Taylor
New this week: Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; Loving Day by Mat Johnson; The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi; The Rocks by Peter Nichols; and The Shore by Sara Taylor. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Women Writers’ Firsts
Over at Ploughshares, reflect on eight women writers’ accomplishments spanning twenty-six centuries. For more impressive writing by women, read Edan Lepucki and Meaghan O’Connell’s discussion of David Copperfield.
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.