“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
Sex, Violence, & Satire Contest
Mixer publishing is running a “Sex, Violence, & Satire” contest with a $1,000 prize, and there’s still time to enter. So, if you’ve been chewing on the idea of writing a story containing “sex and satire,” “violence and satire,” or “sex, violence, and satire,” then consider this motivation to finish it up.
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Strange Cults, Powerful Elders, and Other Features of Academia
Does this harrowing plot summary describe a critically acclaimed film of the 2010s, or does it describe your PhD program?
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Harry Potter Before Harry Potter
“The Books of Magic makes The Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, Harry Potter, and even Twilight all look like entries in the same broad genre of tween-superhero fantasy, in which someone insignificant gets mighty powers, fights the forces of evil, and ultimately triumphs. …The pop culture landscape starts to look like an endless row of Tim Hunters, the same successful formula applied again and again.” From The Atlantic, a look at how Neil Gaiman‘s The Books of Magic prefigured the runaway success of Harry Potter and the modern YA fantasy-adventure craze.
Mad or Not
“It’s not clear whether he really went mad or not, but he was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics—an admirably blunt name, no?”— Frank Key writes about Christopher Smart, “an intimate of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and Henry Fielding” and an excellent cat poet, for the Public Domain Review.
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More Praise for Alina Bronsky
Following up on our look at the German literary landscape, Three Percent publishes a glowing review of Alina Bronsky‘s Broken Glass Park.
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The OA’s New EIC
Take the opportunities provided by this video and this interview to get to know Roger Hodge, the new editor of The Oxford American.