Why should a college student major in English? It’s a question with hundreds of answers, but one of the most common is that reading, more so than other activities, makes you a better person. It sharpens your mind and hones your sense of morality. But what if this comforting idea — as close as you can get to a conviction held by all writers — has little to no basis in reality?
Not a Good Influence
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ex-Husband Can also Write a Memoir
The former Mrs. Elizabeth Gilbert--that is, Michael Cooper, the husband Gilbert left at the opening of Eat Pray Love, has apparently written a book about his life after their divorce. Will it ever be published?
A Quality of Immortality
"When watching [Abbas] Kiarostami films, one also has a great sense of another kind of freedom not found in Hollywood movies, nor in most European art films: freedom from the creeping realization that a film we are watching was made by a cynical shit or a self-deluded megalomaniac." Here's something you don't see every day -- an essay that begins with an Independence Day showing of The Purge: Election Year, and somehow ends up at a poetic examination of Kiarostami's artistic legacy.
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You’re God Damn Right It Does
“Literature matters: Does reading make you smarter?”
The Class of 2013
The Public Domain Review takes a look at the "Class of 2013," a k a their "top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain." Among the names highlighted is Robert Musil, whose novel The Man Without Qualities was reviewed on our site by Matthew Gallaway.
Balance of Power: Grossman and Beha, Reader and Writer
Lev Grossman's article in the Wall Street Journal, "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard," drew an interesting collection of comments, as well as a considered response from Christopher Beha at n+1.
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Love Advice from Chaucer
"Ich am Geoffrey Chaucer, and my litel poeme the Parliament of Foweles was the first to combyne the peanut buttir of Februarye the XIVth wyth the milk chocolate of wooing. And so Ich feel responsible to helpe wyth sum advyce on thys daye." Love advice from Chaucer, via NPR.
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