The most depressing favorable review of a TV show you’ll read this year, LA Review of Books shares why “Catfish: The TV Show” is so poignant and so very sad.
“Thousand-watt sadness”
High Expectations
“My sense, though, was that he was a very complicated man. He could enter a room and be the organizer of games and magic tricks and funny stories and a brilliant mimic and holding forth and entertaining and holding the center. But he was also incredibly controlling; he was domineering.” Ralph Fiennes on playing Charles Dickens.
Den Father
By now the overlap between writers and drug addicts is pretty well-known, but it wasn’t so well-known back when Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In the essay, De Quincey admitted that not only was he addicted to opium, he suspected he’d ingested more of the substance than any other man save Coleridge. (Incidentally, we reviewed a novel by Year in Reading alumnus Jeet Thayil that largely took place in an opium den.)
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Fantasies of Desires
“(The Great Gatsby) is often considered the greatest American novel of the 20th century—I waver on that sometimes but I love the beauty of its writing, its tabloid immediacy, the high body count, its modernistic touches, the relentless drama put into its novella-length form.” Bret Easton Ellis’s top ten favorite books doesn’t include many surprises, but it’s worth a look.
Boo-gali
“Bengali children’s fiction’s limitless supply of ghost stories is matched by little other than its readers’ appetite for it,” writes Siddharthya Swapan Roy. “Anthologies dedicated to ghostly thrills come out with unfailing regularity and every publishing house that does not wish to upset its child readership pays due respects to ghosts and their stories.”
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Rounding Out Frost’s “Monster Myth”
Over at the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler previews a forthcoming collection of Robert Frost’s correspondence. It’s a collection, she says, that will go a long way toward rounding out the flat “monster myth” that’s subsumed the poet’s afterlife.
Ask Her About Her Uterus
“Too often, a woman’s pain is not merely met with doubt, but suspicion, both within the medical community and outside of it.” The New Republic writes about female pain, the medical community, and Abby Norman‘s book, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain.
Advice in Eight Volumes
Remember that time Haruki Murakami decided to write an advice column and answered over 3,000 letters from fans? Well, now a selection of those letters and his wisdom-filled responses are being collected and published as book in eight volumes. Though there are no current plans to translate the work into English, we hope that changes soon – after all, what could be more charming than Murakami’s advice about cats?
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