“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
Adam Novy Interview
Adam Novy, author of The Avian Gospels, is interviewed by Brad Listi for Other People. Their conversation topics include Chicago, Jewishness, Medusa, and "the fear of getting squashed by the universe."
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(Un)Required Reading
"What made The Great Gatsby so great? Does everyone think he’s that great? Why?" Just in time for the back-to-school rush: essay questions from a teacher who didn't finish any of the required reading (a.k.a. McSweeney's).
Back to the Big Easy; Avoiding Bourbon Street
It’s two weeks past Mardi Gras, so you’re probably ready to revisit New Orleans by now. Good timing. Narrative.ly has a week’s worth of stories on the Big Easy, entitled “Beyond Bourbon Street.” (Related: I recommend reading Tulane’s Richard Campanella’s recent piece for Design Observer: “Hating Bourbon Street.”)
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Fiction Writers: Soloists or Thieves?
From Lev Grossman’s blog, “A Brief Taxonomy of Writers”: “As far as I can tell there are two kinds of fiction writers: those who read no fiction while they write, and those who constantly read fiction while they write. Let’s have cute names for them. We’ll call them Soloists and Thieves."
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The Fall of “Man”
In The Age of The Crisis of Man, a new book by n + 1 co-founder and editor Mark Greif, the author examines the life and death of the concept of “man,” aka a unified humankind that could be said to suffer from particular conflicts. It was born in the thirties, with the rise of Fascism, but persisted for decades, eventually giving way to a more diversified view of humanity. In Tablet, Adam Kirsch dives into Greif’s arguments.
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Twitter: like a teenager high on Valium
This week, David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas and the forthcoming The Bone Clocks) is releasing a new short story over 280 tweets (which you can read here). Form follows content, he explains, since his narrator is a teenager high on his mother's Valium. Mitchell joins good company: Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, and other notables have tried their hand with this strange new form. Pair with: a stroll down memory lane with some beloved authors' very first tweets and their best.
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“One, Two, Three, Four. We Want this Superstore.”
Fox Books has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Onion reported. But in reality, Barnes & Noble is facing some big problems, which inspired Michael Agger to write a thank you note to the troubled bookstore. "Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field."
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.