When did Samuel Beckett’s “fail better” become the motto of Silicon Valley? At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell traces the history of the phrase. “Fail Better, with its TEDishly counterintuitive feel, is the literary takeaway par excellence; it’s usefully suggestive, too, of the corporate propaganda of productivity, with its appeals to ‘think different’ or ‘work smarter’ or ‘just do it.'”
Epic Fail
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The Old Town
"What knits together the families of Roth’s Newark are adults—some foreign-born but many the children of immigrants—who either experienced the insecurity and deprivation of the Old World themselves or heard stories about it from their own parents. What they want most is to find stability in a neighborhood, in a city, and in a country that offers them the chance at security for their families." On Philip Roth and Newark, NJ.
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It’s Tuesday! It’s New Releases
The long, long awaited posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting... has arrived. Also newly out today (in the States) is William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms.
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To Be Outnumbered
“At first I had three [children], because I think we need to be outnumbered. It’s good for them. That was my plan when I had three children.” Sit down with Karl Ove Knausgaard as he drives his daughter home. Jonathan Callahan reflects on how Knausgaard’s writing consumes him.
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We at the Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn
The Oxford American has made True Grit author Charles Portis’s “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” available online for the first time. The piece first appeared in an OA issue from 2003, and it’s also available in Escape Velocity, but you should still read it because it’s Charles Portis, damn it, and you’ve only one life to live in this world. (Related: Hobart just published their “Hotel Culture” issue, which is also worth your time.)
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Listening to David Foster Wallace
One measure of a writer may be the quality of the thinking he elicits in others. Here, in advance of The Pale King, is an uncommonly perceptive BBC radio documentary about David Foster Wallace.
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Don’t Look at Me
If you go up to the Internet at a party and say hi, don’t feel offended if it scowls and turns away. The truth is, the Internet just has a thing for introverts.
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Which One Will Write An Essay About It First?
Did you miss 192 Books' Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan conversation a few weeks back? Well, good thing for you that FSG put the whole transcript online.