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”
Fathers and Daughters
A writer in her own right, Sybille Lacan reflects on her experience as the daughter of famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. She writes, “Father, for our birthdays, would give us superb gifts (I believe it took me far too long to understand it was not he who had picked them out).”
I Grow Old
“If there is one thing more depressing than reading other people’s old letters it is reading one’s own.” Becoming T. S. Eliot.
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Hurricane Harvey Relief
The Texas Library Association has a disaster relief fund to support damaged libraries, and you can give to it here (via Book Riot).
Saturday Fiction with Faber and Gay
You can listen to stories by Michel Faber and Roxane Gay over at WNYC’s website. Gay’s piece, which is performed by Adepero Oduye, was recently selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories.
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How to Backfire
Turns out the Streisand effect applies to book sales. The Wall Street Journal reports that banning a book in China causes sales to increase both at home and abroad. “These days, smothering someone is as good as crowning that person,” the article quotes a Chinese reader as saying. You could also read Deanna Fei on being a Chinese-American writer in China.
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Pale King Confusion
After our discovery yesterday that The Pale King was already on sale, the New York Times finds lots of angry booksellers, but not much by way of explanation.