“Well, continuing with my policy of baring my soul, Dwight Garner said something like, the book was like one of those satellite photos of North Korea when I talked about the second marriage. I obviously had very little access to Updike from ‘77 on, really. And I cheated a bit by using Ian McEwan as my spy in the Updike household. First of all, Updike definitely did pull up the drawbridge and retire into his castle and I thought, in a sense, that this should be respected. He had decided on his persona, at that point—the highly professional man of letters. And I thought, why not let him go out with that persona intact?” At The Awl, Elon Green talks with Adam Begley about his new biography of John Updike.
Disappearance Man
How To Be A Woman (For Less)
(American) Readers who dug Rob Delaney’s Year In Reading post will be pleased to learn that the eBook of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman is on sale for the low, low price of $1.99. (Along with nine other memoirs, too!)
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“I run around my house with bacon on my head and Sam Tanenhaus is sending me notes.”
Ron Charles, the WaPo’s fiction critic and the witty and winning originator of the “video book review” genre, gets profiled in Publishers Weekly.
Place to Place
“Now the lattice that connects us is digitally immediate we travel all the more, but we’ve lost this thrill of adventure. It’s oddly touching to read a novel where journeys are so inherently exciting, and it makes the book both consummately funny and poignantly elegiac.” On the novel Changing Places by David Lodge.
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Drinking Fitzgerald Under the Table
“Most of us can’t write like our heroes, but nearly every one of us can try to drink like them.” Ian Crouch examines the myth of the great alcoholic writer and Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend in The New Yorker‘s “The Book That Will Make You Never Want to Drink Again.”
Green Whisky
9,000 homes in Scotland are going to be powered by whisky. Could Maker’s Mark be bringing a similar idea to our side of the pond?
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The Shakespeare Oxford Society
Unsurprisingly, the Oxfordian theory-inspired blockbuster Anonymous is ruffling some feathers in college English departments. The “Shakespeare Oxford Society,” of course, has a rejoinder.
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