“It may be true… that the internet will turn out to be ‘a giant empathy machine.’ And yet, as any reader knows, we’ve already had one for centuries.” Drew Calvert reviews The Novel: A Biography for the Los Angeles Review of Books and provides an argument for the novel in the digital age.
“A Giant Empathy Machine”
Weaponized Friendship
Recommended reading: This review of The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship by Marilyn Yalom and Theresa Donovan Brown. Here are a couple of complementary friendship-related essays from The Millions.
●
●
“Simultaneously less explicit and more explicit”
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the upcoming Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, the novel that Slate writer Tammy Oler called “a rite of passage for teenage girls in the ‘80s.” Now, Willa Paskin reviews the new film, lamenting that it “acts as if it is just another life-affirming Lifetime movie about surviving terrible situations.”
●
●
Conquest of Panic
Irving Howe asks how Hemingway commanded the attention of a generation. Howe writes, “His great subject, I think, was panic.” Our own Michael Bourne recently answered this question, recognizing Hemingway as a middlebrow revolutionary.
●
●
U.S. History Textbooks or J.K. Rowling’s Magic
Over at Indian Country Today Media Network, read a statement in response to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America. “What matters here, folks, in this debate over J.K. Rowling’s latest work is the language society uses – the language that is still taught to kids in schools today about Native Americans and our spiritualities.”
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Crowdsourcing a Book
Important Indiegogo Alert: Kenneth James is editing the personal journals of novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany in a five-volume series. The first volume is complete, and James is asking for a bit of help to complete the second. Neil Gaiman has offered substantial monetary support.
Appearing Elsewhere
For those in the Bay Area, Millions contributor Edan Lepucki will be reading from her novel Days of Insignificance and Evil at the Intersection for the Arts Award Celebration tonight at 7:30 p.m. The address is 446 Valencia St, San Francisco, 94103.
●
●
On Ike and the Liking Thereof
Doodling Lit
We all doodle, but Meg Wolitzer gets inspired by it. When she was writing The Interestings, she frequently drew her way into her characters. “I sometimes drew crude, Harvey- and Archie-inspired images of my characters, in keeping with the spirit of Ethan Figman and Figland,” she wrote in The New Yorker.
Any experience with a news site’s comments section reveals that the idea the Internet is an empathy engine is a cruel joke.