In the pages of the Washington Post, the venerable Miss Manners responds to an English department secretary who feels “besieged by fringe ‘academics’ who are very adamant that we are part of a conspiracy to cover up the fact that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare.”
Help Her, Miss Manners
The Squirrels Are Coming!
Whether they’re “coordinat[ing] kamikaze attacks on the power grid,” “damaging [a nuclear missile] base’s physical infrastructure,” or even just water-skiing, I feel that it must be said unequivocally: I for one welcome our new squirrel overlords.
Goodbye, Friday Night Lights
It’s been one week since the “Friday Night Lights” finale aired on network television, and it seems as though the entire internet is grieving. Two Grantland pieces: an oral history and a tongue-in-cheek analysis; an opinion piece juxtaposing Peter Berg‘s low-rated drama against “Glee”‘s success; and now even The Paris Review has thrown its hat into the ring. All of this, of course, comes on the heels of our own Sonya Chung‘s piece last April.
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Guernica Interviews Gore Vidal
Guernica has a previously unpublished interview with Gore Vidal, who died recently at the age of 86.
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A Day in the Life of a Literary Agent
“There really is no average day in the life of a literary agent,” writes Mark Gottlieb in his attempt to describe an average day in the life of a literary agent.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Bernhard, Martin, Dickens
Back in print is Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence & My Prizes. Also new this week are a pair of spiffy box sets, George R.R. Martin’s Song Of Ice and Fire and the major works of Charles Dickens.
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Titular Oddities
The shortlist for the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of 2010 has been announced. Among the hopefuls: Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way.
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Auditors Welcome
Historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain have done us all a serious solid by assembling a syllabus of readings around “what many simply call ‘Trumpism’: personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation.” The self-directed course contains readings from more than 100 scholars – including Audre Lorde, Aziz Ansari, and Ta-Nehisi Coates – and aims to “introduce observers to the past and present conditions that allowed Trump to seize electoral control of a major American political party.”
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Cheering Up the Country
Recommended Reading: Booker Prize winner Anne Enright on Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December.