Recommended Reading: Roxane Gay’s short story about a summer romance, “The Year I Learned Everything,” at Rookie. “He’s the best-looking of the bunch so you can imagine how ugly his friends are.”
Poolside Romance
Stevenson as Kurtz
“Since the middle of the 20th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby—larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane—and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway).” Matthew Pearl asks: was Robert Louis Stevenson the blueprint for Conrad‘s Kurtz?
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Head in a Book
Pen, paper, and a brain scan: the newest trend in literary criticism might be “neurohumanities.”
Epistolary Criticism
Full Stop’s book club is discussing the stories of Clarice Lispector throughout this week in an in-depth email exchange conducted by contributors Becca Rothfeld and Nathan Goldman. Pair with Magdalena Edwards‘s Millions review of the collection.
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A Shared Vernacular
Year in Reading alum David L. Ulin writes about how books forged a bond between him and his father. “Books are, have always been, a shared vernacular between us.”
Elena Ferrante Writing for Kids
Elena Ferrante will be publishing a children’s book, The Beach at Night, this December. Revisit our own Jacob Lambert’s series on whether or not picture books are leading our children astray to prepare for the release.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Los Angeles-based Millions readers might be interested in Sunday night’s edition of Tongue and Groove at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. I’ll be reading, along with writers Cecil Castellucci, Michael O’Keefe, Frank Montesonti, and Giuliana Mayo. Show starts at 6 pm.
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