Joshua Rothman writes for The New Yorker about Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, privacy and “a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open.”
Mrs. Dalloway’s Privacy
Literary Resolutions
The new year is, of course, a time for resolutions, and Electric Literature has collected literary resolutions from Alexander Chee, Year in Reading alum Emily Gould, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and many more. Coming out of the hectic holiday season, Jonathan Lee‘s resolution seems particularly apt: “My literary new year’s resolution is to read slower. I want to try and re-discover the kind of reading where you savor every page instead of thinking about unread emails, progress through the book, progress through the to-be-read pile, and the quantity of remaining tea bags in cupboard.”
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Mother Tongue
“Or again, does a ‘newsagent’ really need to become a ‘news dealer,’ a ‘flyover’ an ‘overpass,’ a ‘parcel’ a ‘package,’ or in certain circumstances ‘between’ ‘among’ and ‘like’ ‘such as’?” How to sound American.
Facts and Feelings
“Historical fiction was not—and is not—meant to supplant literature from the period it describes.” Year in Reading alumnus Alexander Chee on historical novels and creative liberties.
On the Greatness of Talking Rabbits
A decade before Matt Groening created The Simpsons, he debuted his first comic, Life in Hell, at a record store in Los Angeles. The strip kept running for thirty-five years, even after The Simpsons brought its creator international fame. He decided to end it earlier this year, and his fans (including Alison Bechdel) are paying tribute.
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Booker Prize Shortlist Odds
With the Booker Prize shortlist out, the bookies have updated the odds. Tom McCarthy’s C emerges as the new favorite and Peter Carey and Andrea Levy are surprising long shots.
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Doc Brown: Hippie?
Back to the Future II originally featured a very different Doc Brown from the one that made the final cut. Behold Doc’s 1967 alias, his hippie parents, and his apparent affinity for motorcycles in this 147-page script (PDF) that was later re-purposed into the movie we know today. (The Bizarro Doc action picks up around page 90.)
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