The latest installment in The Believer’s “What Would Twitter Do?” series (which we’ve mentioned before) features London Review of Books editor Christian Lorentzen, whose Twitter feed, Sheila Heti writes, “seem[s] like what someone who only expresse[s] himself as a fiction writer within the universe of twitter might come up with.” Meanwhile, Heti has a review of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman in (where else?) the LRB.
“I guess you could call this ‘fake livetweeting’.”
Links for Literary Aspirations
If you have aspirations of the literary sort, I strongly recommend Dan Wickett’s interview with “founders, editors and managing editors of 8 Literary Journals of varying age and size.” And you should also look at the latest posts at Mad Max Perkins’ Book Angst in which hears from editors and publishing industry types about “the true meaning of midlist.”
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Fiction by Allegra Goodman
Recommended reading: elderly sisters contend with the youngest dying, in a quietly wry new story by Allegra Goodman at the New Yorker. “She pretended to sleep, and then she really did drop off. When she woke, her sisters were hovering over her. Some of us have overstayed our welcome, Jeanne thought. And then, with sudden shock, No: I’m the one. That would be me.”
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“He could easily get seasonal work as a shopping-mall Santa.”
“Mad scientist of smut” Nicholson Baker gets the New York Times treatment.
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The Naked Truth About Favorite Poems
Reddit users asked one another to name their all-time favorite poems. Not to be outdone, Poetry Brain asked its Twitter followers to name their all-time favorite poems… to read naked. Since I imagine the latter group is usually only able to read in the buff while at home, I bet they really lament the 2001 demise of Harvard’s “Phone-a-Poem” feature.
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iStephen Fry
Stephen Fry joins “the congregation at the Church of Apple” for the launch of the iPad and shares his thoughts on the company and its newest product.
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Degrees of Separation
Urmila Seshagiri writes for Public Books about Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words in its original Italian. As she explains it, “the dual-language Italian-English format literalizes the very ‘separazione totale’ that is In altre parole’s subject, reminding us, page by page, of potential losses.” Pair with Hannah Gersen’s Millions review of the book.