A couple weeks ago, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll argued in a Salon piece that David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay about the television and irony back in the early ‘90s, presciently diagnosed the danger of snark in our own age. Now Peter Finocchiaro, a senior editor at Salon, argues instead that we need irony more than we ever have. You could also read A-J Aronstein’s notes from the DFW Symposium.
Not What You Said Before
Defense Against Detractors
Recommended reading: Adele Waldman defends the purpose and form of the novel and balances David Shield‘s Reality Hunger against Anna Karenina.
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Pale King Confusion
After our discovery yesterday that The Pale King was already on sale, the New York Times finds lots of angry booksellers, but not much by way of explanation.
Grand Officier Yaşar Bey
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Something More Pleasant
You may have read some of our pieces on graphic novels and comics. The form is increasingly seen as an indispensable genre of literature. At Slate, a team of judges select the nominees for their third annual Cartoonist Studio Prize, including Here by Richard McGuire and Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast.
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Discarded Hashtags
“Don’t die on the toilet; / it’s really the worst way to go.” Do yourself a favor and go check out this selection of new poems by Elizabeth Scanlon at Electric Literature.
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Dispatches from Down Under
“With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea,” our own Michael Bourne writes in his Dispatches column at The Common, “Stanley Street.”
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Far
“I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.” Jonathan Safran Foer believes that technology is making us more detached. Pair with The New Yorker’s essay on netiquette.
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