Recommended Reading: Zadie Smith’s latest short story, “Moonlit Landscape with Bridge,” at The New Yorker. “The Minister got stuck on a sentence: I am further from my village now than I have ever been. Italicized just like that, in his mind.”
New Zadie Smith
Dublinalia
It’s common for descriptions of James Joyce’s Dubliners to label its stories portraits of Irish life. If you’d like to look at actual portraits of Irish life in 1904, however, you could do a lot worse than this series of old photos of Dublin, available online courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute.
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Thanks for Nothing, Dickens
Want to publish anonymously (and then stay that way)? Be thankful you’re not friends with Charles Dickens.
Non-Issues
“As a gay man, I would argue that gender and sexual identities are irrelevant, complete non-issues.” Alexandre Vidal Porto talks with our own Bruna Dantas Lobato about Brazilian fiction, gender identity, and his second novel, Sergio Y., at BOMB Magazine.
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Trigger warning: Breakups ahead
Kim Addonizio‘s latest collection of short stories, The Palace of Illusions, is due out this month. Here is a sneak peek, the story, “Another Breakup Song,” featuring a distinctly Raymond Carver-esque vibe.
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Friendly Neighborhood
Comics fans will know that a new Marvel storyline may — just possibly — reunite Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. This has, understandably, produced a range of reactions, not least of which is this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argues that the two embody a healthy marriage. “[Their] marriage was a rejection of the macho ideal of romance—which reigns even among nerds—and it mirrored and confirmed my own budding sense of what love was at a very young age,” he writes. You could also read Paul Morton on the character of Peter Parker.
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David Simon Working on a Pogues Musical
The Wire creator David Simon is at work on a Pogues musical, reports Rolling Stone. Where will they possibly find a Broadway star with the right teeth to play Shane MacGowan?
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The S Monster
ICYMI, J.J. Abrams (of Lost and Star Trek fame) will release a novel — conceived by Abrams and written by Doug Dorst — in October with the enigmatic title of S. Last month, he released the first half of a teaser trailer; this week, he released the second half.
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