Recommended Listening: Florida Memory’s great collection of Zora Neale Hurston singing.
Songs of Zora
“The quality of detaching itself from its period”
“For a man who is making his living as a critic to write about Scott Fitzgerald without mentioning The Great Gatsby just means that he doesn't know his business. Many people consider The Great Gatsby one of the few classic American novels. I do myself. Obviously such a judgment is debatable.” The New Republic digs up a tribute by John Dos Passos.
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e-Forgetting
Dwight Garner's New York Times piece last weekend, "The Way We Read Now," was a joy, but I wonder how his opinions might've changed had he read this Time article first. Apparently some scientists speculate it's harder to remember digital content than print.
Miranda July, Craigslist Reseller
Miranda July's new project, It Chooses You, is a store based on her new book (published by McSweeney’s) of the same name. The store, at Partner’s and Spade in SoHo, is an exercise in buying belongings from New York-area Craigslist sellers and reselling the contents for the exact same price.
The Future by Philip K. Dick
"Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together." An essay in the Boston Review argues the importance of Philip K. Dick's literature— where the real and fake intersect and collide — and the world we live in today. From our archive: on the pleasures of Dick's sometimes awful prose.
Talking Truth to Power
“Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider. She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.” The New Yorker profiles Gloria Steinem in anticipation of her latest release, My Life on the Road.
Fresh Powder
Year in Reading alumnus (and co-founder of The Morning News) Rosecrans Baldwin talks shop with Thomas Stoeckli, a photographer from Switzerland who specializes in photos of snowboarders.
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In Defense of Criticism
Glen Duncan, author of the genre novel The Last Werewolf, opened his New York Times review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One with this controversial line: "A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star". Understandably, this led to some uproar. Now he's doubling down on his stance.
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Obsessing Over Women
Parul Sehgal cures your “bland biography”-induced malaise by prescribing “three delightfully deranging books” in which writers “riff on the women who’ve consumed them.”
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