Despite the “grotesquerie of courtship rituals” they present, Roxane Gay enjoys watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, in part because, as she explains, they hearken back to America’s Puritan origins. In The New York Times, the essayist, novelist and Year in Reading alum reflects on a guilty pleasure.
Paradox of Choice
A Budding Fan
In 1964, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin wrote Marvel icon Stan Lee a fan letter.
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Susan Choi on Her Quarantine Reading Schedule
Susan Choi on the writer's responsibility to read and how the quarantine has given her more time to read.
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Book Nerd Gift Alert
I did not know this existed: Trivial Pursuit Book Lover’s Edition. I suspect that Millions readers would be quite skilled. Sample question: “What Hardy novel features a doomed title heroine who names her daughter Sorrow?” Bookslut took the game for a spin a few years back.
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Tabloid Fodder
“Sitting down to read The Actress, Amy Sohn’s newest novel, is even better than standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you disputes the price of a carton of orange juice, giving you extra time to read the tabloids. The Actress might be as licentious as a tabloid, but it is far more intelligently written. And, you probably won’t be reading it while standing in line inside a grocery store.”
War Stories
Over at The Rumpus, Caleb Cage interviewed Year in Reading alumnus Phil Klay about wars and human nature.
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The Contrived
It’s a common saying among actors that the script does most of the work. Which raises an interesting question: is it possible for a great writer to make art out of a bad story? At The Kenyon Review’s blog, Amit Majmudar says it is, using Shakespeare as proof. Related: five experts on the Bard’s greatest plays.
Give Not a Fig
“Maybe Gnossos, had [Richard] Fariña lived long enough for a sequel, would have wound up on a commune in Canada, nibbling feta and blissed out on retsina, exhaling paregoric joints in some lush and fragrant garden … But he died in his twenties, like a lot of energetic young men of his era. It was the kind of romantic death we feel we understand almost too well, a promising talent suspended, that sense of exemption he wrote about—from mediocrity, from bourgeois compromise and midlife disappointment—a membrane forever intact.” On the enduring joys and exuberant voice of Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.
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