“What’s the kindest thing you almost did?” You’ll find this sentence by Jonathan Safran Foer on a Chipotle cup next time you eat a burrito there. The fast food restaurant will feature the short stories five authors, including Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Michael Lewis, on its cups, and unlike guacamole, they won’t cost extra. Unsurprisingly, Cormac McCarthy didn’t make a cup.
Burrito Lit
Mariama Bâ, Grande Dame of African Literature
Mariama Bâ, hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent, was one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author.
●
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Encyclopedic Knowledge
A transcript of Jorge Luis Borges’s conversation with Argentinian poet Osvaldo Ferrari about the power and pleasure of academic knowledge appears in English for the first time. As Borges explains it, “I think that the encyclopedia, for a leisurely, curious man, is the most pleasing of literary genres.”
There’s No Escaping Your Textbooks Now
A new service available to Australian students might cut down on the line lengths at university bookstores. Then again, it might also usher in an age of self-aware, Skynet-esque airborne Terminators. Presenting: drones specializing in textbook delivery.
Some Links
E-paper continues to get press. The New York Times talks up the technology’s potential for newspapers. See also: The digital future of the book.MetaxuCafe is covering the Pen World Voices Festival.Sara Gran, much praised for her book Dope and her blog has a new edition of her book, Come Closer, coming out.
●
●
Wardrobe A-Z
No idea what to wear to your next reading? Need to know the best sock pattern to wear while discussing magical realism? Want to coordinate your nail polish to your Amazon ranking? Buzzfeed’s here to help with this “Illustrated A-Z Guide to Author Wardrobe Staples.”
●
●
Well, this is it, folks. This is the crowning achievement in pretentiousness. Many contemporary practitioners of “literary fiction” have offered their contributions. But Jonny Saffron is King. He is The One True A-Hole. For years I was convinced nothing would top him reducing 9/11 into a cute flip book (for dramatic effect!). How naive I was. Jonny Saffron broke free from the shackles of fiction and ascended to the heights of non-fictive moral superiority with his masturbatory shame-lecture about lunch. This was, and still is, pretentiousness’ magnum opus.
But this article tops it all. Everything Jonny Saffron says in this article – every sentence, practically every word – is utterly ridiculous. Just start at the beginning. Jonny Saffron “wanted to die from frustration” because he couldn’t multitask while eating? While this is probably his subtle way of announcing that he is so literary and so serious that he spends every second of his day “engaging with texts”, I also feel terribly sorry for the maitre d’ who must keep him entertained when he has a craving for tempeh in a non-“fast casual” setting.
There is more, so much more. But every now and then, Jonny Saffron will weave a paragraph of such astounding absurdity, such self-congratulatory emptiness, such face-punchable gas-baggery, that he manages to re-calibrate the limits of pretentious possibility:
“..what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”
Cull this over for a minute. He is saying, with masterful concision, that:
1. Chipotle’s clientele is extremely diverse
2. His writing is good
3. Most people have access to Chipotle but not a library
4. Most people who can afford 8-dollar burritos can’t afford to buy books
5. He is doing this for the good of democracy
6. He is good for doing this
I am in awe.