Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they’re so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
9.5 Pornographic Fairy Tales
This interview with Joanna Walsh, creator of the #Readwomen Twitter account and fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine, is just plain fun. In it, Walsh touches on nearly everything from sex writing to Sigmund Freud to the Marx Brothers.
A Portrait of the Musician as a Young Man
James Joyce inspires a lot of English papers but not songs. Yet musician Casey Black based his song “Happiness” off of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With lyrics like, “So I walk the Dublin streets like they were passageways through my soul,” we think Joyce would approve.
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The Naipaul Test
V.S. Naipaul (seemingly a professional misogynist at times) rankled many by suggesting there are no women writers that can equal him and calling Jane Austen “sentimental.” Now the Guardian offers up a quiz that challenges readers to identify the gender of an author simply by reading a passage of his or her writing.
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Poet Szymborska Dies
The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, who contributed to samizdat magazines before the fall of the Iron Curtain, died yesterday. Among her more popular collections is View with a Grain of Sand.
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