The New York Times unearthed footage from a 1996 interview with Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen. The pair discuss a trip they took to New Guinea in the 60s, which “resulted in Gardner’s film Dead Birds and Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall.”
Robert Gardner and Peter Matthiessen in Conversation
Charter Schools
Diane Ravitch takes on the documentary Waiting for Superman in the “Myth of Charter Schools” for The New York Review of Books.
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Magical Listening
At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion’s Salvador and finds that it remains “immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror.”
Fin
How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful — she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung’s essay on literary endings.)
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Who Keeps the Gatekeepers?
Are you embarrassed about your lack of literary inheritance? You’re not alone. Here’s a great piece by Annie Liontas at The New York Times on those first, lonely forays into the literary world: “But I see my experience as an immigrant into the world of letters as a blessing. Being an outsider is the origin of my imagination; it gives me the constant consciousness that my perspective is only one of many and that there are myriad ways of being in the world. It grants me the gift of being attuned to the voices in the room, as well as all of those shut out of it.”
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Amazon Books Expands?
I directed your attention to the opening of the first Amazon Books in Seattle. Now, reports are coming in that Amazon could have plans to open 300-400 more stores across the country. Other sources say the expansion could be more modest.
“You have always been a dark labyrinth”
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Serial
“What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization.” An argument for bringing back the serialized novel in the spirit of Dickens, Thackeray and Arthur Conan Doyle from The Washington Post.
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