“The Goldfinch is a grand nineteenth-century novel in that it is an 800-page chronicle of capitalism, a paean to the ways in which the world turns on the questions of who can or can’t pay for what, and how these abilities and inabilities mold us over time. Like the life events and relationships it depicts, it purports to be about love but is actually about money. This portrayal of twentieth century North American society is accurate, but also, just as in life, both exhausting and demoralizing.” On Donna Tartt’s latest novel. (You could also read Adam Dalva’s take on the book.)
Capital Idea
Leftover Links
Some seriously deranged Amazon customer reviews. (via Doc Searls)A year ago “Our Lady of the Underpass” was a Chicago phenomenon. Eric Zorn revisits.Chimney sweeps and flower pots are the stuff of poetry for Sam.Dale Peck’s recent judgment in the Tournament of Books is scarcely worth mentioning, but I did very much enjoy Kevin Guilfoile’s commentary on the topic as well as his tale about meeting Ken Kesey.Kakutani’s reign of terror turns 25.The Literary Saloon points us to Jonathan Franzen’s new book. It’s a memoir, and like Ed, I am disappointed by that.The Rake chats with Charles D’Ambrosio
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Clever Girl(s)
If you’re struggling to find a book deal, you might want to skip this story because it’ll be so demoralizing: a group of women are making a ton of money by publishing “dinosaur erotica” with titles such as Taken by the T-Rex, Ravished by the Triceratops, and Taken by the Pterodactyl. (Pretty lame, if you ask me, that that last title isn’t spelled “Ptaken…”)
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“And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly tweet.”
Henry Eliot, playing the Host, led an expedition of 24 pilgrims on a modern-day, multimedia reenactment of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. You can check out their recap complete with pictures, audio, and video over at The Guardian.
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B|ta’arof Launches A Poetry Series
B|ta’arof – which launched last year – announced a new poetry series featuring translations of “contemporary poems written in Persian and translated into English by emerging poets and scholars in the Iranian diaspora.” The translations will be accompanied by brief interviews with the translators, each consisting of the same five questions. “The idea,” according to the mission statement, “is to pull back the curtain on the process of translation, revealing how it is subject to individual choices and proclivities—the first choice being what poem to even translate.”
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