What do you do when McSweeney’s rejects your humor piece? You could, like most people, slink off and write something new, perhaps after a quick look at the site to get a better sense of what they’re looking for, or you could write a new humor piece about getting rejected by McSweeney’s. At The Nervous Breakdown, Rachel Pollan takes the latter route (with a cameo by the movie Swingers).
Area Woman Makes the Best of It
Art Spiegelman on the Lasting Power of ‘Maus’
Art Spiegelman on Maus, which is back in the news after being banned by a Tennessee school board.
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Reporting from Collapse
Recommended Listening: David Naimon interviews Year in Reading alumnus Brian Evenson about his A Collapse of Horses, literary horror, and philosophy.
Back to the Future
Photographer Irina Werning‘s “Back to the Future” series recreated and updated various childhood portraits. Its sequel, “Back to the Future II“, is just as awesome. (Note: One or two images per series are NSFW)
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Dear Sirs, I Do Enjoy This
Brontë-inspired short fiction courtesy of Rachel Cantor? Sure, why not. (For background, you might want to read our own Edan Lepucki’s takedown of the love interest in Jane Eyre.)
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DWF – Dating While Feminist
Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s new book Outdated: How Dating is Ruining Your Love Life starts a public conversation about the pitfalls of Dating While Feminist (DWF).
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New (Yorker) Murakami
Recommended Reading: “Samsa In Love,” Haruki Murakami’s new fiction in the latest issue of The New Yorker. Bonus: Did you know he translated Jim Fusilli’s 33 1/3 book on Pet Sounds?
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Not Sure
Are people losing interest in fiction that “offers more questions than answers?” In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley suggested that modern readers have little taste for uncertainty. At The Rumpus, Rob Roberge asks how much this contributes to popular disinterest in literature.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Dovlatov; Rieger; Levine; Kaysen; Jia; Mirvis; Merwin; Wright
New this week: Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov; The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger; Hyde by Daniel Levine; Cambridge by Girl, Interrupted author Susanna Kaysen; Decoded by Mai Jia; Visible City by Tova Mirvis; The Moon Before Morning by W.S. Merwin; and Caribou by Charles Wright.
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