If you’ve finished winding your way through Elise Liu’s recommended New Yorker articles – which, as of this week, are free to be read online – you can start working your way through Longform’s roundup of their 25 favorite unlocked pieces. (Or you can go even bigger, thanks to The Awl.)
Combing The New Yorker’s Archives
HBO Turns Down The Corrections
HBO turned down the television adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, despite an all-star crew: Franzen himself adapted the novel to television, Noah Baumbach promised to direct the series, and Ewan McGregor and Maggie Gyllenhaal were cast as leads. Novelist A-J Aronstein can now breath a sigh of relief; they won’t be filming The Corrections at anyone’s house.
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Jay Gatsby, Iconic American
BBC‘s Tom Geoghegan asks whether or not The Great Gatsby is “the perfect tale for modern America.”
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Said the Gramophone
Over at Words Without Borders, Esther Allen considers how to translate a song. As she puts it, “A song that almost everyone in a given culture at a given moment knows is a unique cultural artifact, a crystallized collective experience, a profound trigger that sets off a complex string of shared emotions.” Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on songs as triggers.
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“Does it help writers to drink?”
Writing for The Guardian, Blake Morrison ponders the eternal question: “does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or … advertising executives?”
Martin Amis in The Globe and Mail
Martin Amis is interviewed in The Globe and Mail: “All my novels are feminist from about 1980 on.”
New Maeve Binchy Coming Up
When Maeve Binchy passed away two years ago, she left behind a novel, A Week in Winter, that appeared to cap off an accomplished 40-year career. It turns out her fans have more posthumous work to look forward to: a new 400-page story collection, Chestnut Street, that comes out on April 24th.
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This Old House
It’s been another long week. Lighten the crush of news with The Guardian‘s literary quiz, in which you match the house to the writer/book it inspired. And once you’ve gotten your score, perhaps take a vicarious tour of the House of Brontë?
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Milton’s Shakespearean Marginalia
In a copy of Shakespeare's first folio, researchers found a hand-written annotation by none other than Paradise Lost author John Milton.
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