Courtesy of fake-news juggernaut The Onion, a new viral website honest about its purpose: “I think we see the ideal ClickHole reader as a hollow shell who exists purely to click on our content and then share that content with other hollow shells.” (Also: the same technique on headlines, applied to books.)
A Fake News Site Makes Fake Fake News. You Won’t Stop Laughing At What Happens Next
Don’t Read This When Hungry
Recommended Reading: Kevin Brockmeier's essay "Dead Last Is a Kind of Second Place" at The Georgia Review. "Someone at school has been stealing people’s lunches from their lockers—including, for the fifth time now, his. He needs a new plan, since obviously the potato chips didn’t work." For more Brockmeier, check out our review of his novel The Illumination.
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The Golden Age of Women Essayists
The essay is more popular than ever. At Salon, Michele Filgate talks to Leslie Jamison (author of The Empathy Exams, here's our review) and Roxane Gay (author of the forthcoming Bad Feminist) about the power of the genre. Gay believes our interest in essays is because of a "cultural preoccupation with the exposure of the self." They also discuss if we're in a golden age of women essayists. "Sometimes when men write about private feeling, it’s seen as exploratory or daring, and when women write about private feeling it’s seen as limited or in the vein of a kind of circumscribed emotional writing," Jamison says.
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Our Correspondent
As a poet, historian, critic, translator and editor of The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley was a genuine literary polymath, which is why it’s not surprising that he wrote eloquent letters. In one, for example, he described Larry McMurtry, who Cowley taught when McMurtry was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, as a “wild young man from Texas, expert in pornography.” In the Times, Dwight Garner reviews The Long Voyage, a new collection of Cowley’s letters.
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The New Yorker on The Late American Novel
The folks at The New Yorker's Book Bench offer their take at The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. (Spoiler Alert: Katherine Hepburn gets a shoutout.)
Guns N’ Roses N’ Meth
In this piece on "Southern Enlightenment", Kevin Charles Redmon checks out John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead and Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana for The Rumpus. In the process, he touches on Axl Rose and methamphetamines.
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Light Us Up
For whatever reason, the Zippo lighter has earned a place as an icon of Americana, a symbol of everything simple and reliable in the country. At the Ploughshares blog, Nancy McCabein pays a visit to the Zippo Museum, punctuating her account with quotes from works of literature that feature the lighter.
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Recession, Eh? Not Up Here
The oil boom occurring in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada's Bakken Formation is so frantic right now that ND's unemployment rate is only 3.4%, the lowest in the nation. "Hiring is so frantic," writes Business Week's Bryan Gruley, "the McDonald's in Dickinson [North Dakota] is offering $300 signing bonuses."
Some Choice DFW Links
GQ offers an insightful interview with The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman on the subject of editing David Foster Wallace...while elsewhere, the German translation of Infinite Jest - Un Endlicher Spass - becomes an unlikely hit. (via)
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