Last week, we discussed how Teju Cole has mastered literary Twitter, and that was before we knew that he tweeted a 4,000-word essay on immigration. “A Piece of the Wall” is composed of 250 tweets written during a seven-hour period and starts with: “I hear the sound of faint bells in the distance. It is like a sound in a dream, or the jingling at the beginning of a Christmas song.”
Teju’s Twitter Takeover
Ferlinghetti’s Journals Forthcoming
95-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti plans to publish his travel journals in September 2015, reports SFGate. The journals should cover his experience as a submarine chaser in World War II through his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, as well as his travels through Central and South America later on.
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New Releases: Foer, Coupland, King
Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is out today. It’s 1,100 pages and is being compared to The Stand. Meanwhile, Generation A by Douglas Coupland is also hitting shelves. It’s a sequel to Coupland’s famous, influential debut, Generation X. Also out last week was Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatise on vegetarianism, Eating Animals, which picked up a mixed review in the New Yorker.
Limning in 140 Characters
A satirical Michiko Kakutani Twitter presence has emerged, and the (allegedly) real critic has some guesses as to the doppelgänger’s identity. EDIT: Lindsay Goldwert’s helpfully rounded up the gossip.
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The Marriage Plot Problem
Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
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