Last week, Erin Fortenberry reviewed Walter Kirn’s Blood Will Out for The Millions, writing that the events in the book were partly centered on Kirn himself. Now, in the Times, Janet Maslin reads the book, which struck her as “primarily a tale of seduction.”
Art of Seduction
Appearing Elsewhere
Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
For the Birds
It’s not easy being a seagull. Over at the London Review of Books, Mary Wellesley takes a sympathetic look at how the much-maligned bird has been treated throughout the history of literature. Afterwards, let this essay from The Millions by Kristen Scharold on the joys of birdwatching lift your spirits a bit.
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nature has designed them to be irresistible
Great news for food lovers and over-thinkers everywhere: Gastronomica, the James Beard Award winning journal that takes a highminded approach to food and taste, recently began publishing writing online. Start with this lovely long article on the competition between Chinese and French black truffles. Or with a slightly cheeky revision of Pierre Bourdieu’s food space, if that’s more your, um, cup of tea.
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Consider the Chapter
“What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?” Nicholas Dames answers with an essay in The New Yorker.
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What Was the Hipster?
n+1 posts several amusing excerpts from their “What Was The Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation” piece to be released in full later this month: “Like ‘douchebag,’ ‘hipster’ was a name that no one could apply to oneself. But the opportunity to call someone else a ‘douchebag’: that offered the would-be hipster a means of self-identification by a name one could say, looking outward. In the douchebag, the hipster had found its Other.”
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Ottessa Moshfegh on Imagination in Isolation
Ottessa Moshfegh's new book, Death in Her Hands, follows Vesta, a woman whose isolation takes on new significance in today's quarantined climate.
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Steady As She Goes
“I prefer … to believe, in the weird and sometimes happy accidents that result—in this case—in kissing a beautiful stranger in the rain. It didn’t really change anything, but it wasn’t trivial. It was one of those encounters that rises up out of nowhere and sinks back into it, giving off light and energy as it goes.” Kim Addonizio’s new addition to Guernica’s “The Kiss” series is fantastic and life-affirming.
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