Recommended Reading: Larissa Pham on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. You could also read Holloway McCandless on the author’s By Nightfall.
“Depression has a peculiar texture”
The Author Talks Back
Recommended Listening: Over at WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR member station, White Trash author Nancy Isenberg responds to Michael Bourne’s Millions review of her book. Her comment starts a few seconds before minute twenty-seven.
From the Crawleys to the Capulets
Romeo and Juliet is getting the Downton Abbey treatment. The first trailer for Julian Fellowes’ adaptation is out and features Hailee Steinfeld and Douglas Booth as the ill-fated young lovers.
Putin’s Call for a Russian Canon
The process of “Russification” is almost as old as Russia itself, yet to see it take shape in the present day can be quite distressing. In particular, Vladimir Putin’s recent proposal in Nezavisimaya Gazeta — in which the prime minister called for a “Russian canon” of literary works — has some people worried about its insidious potential for propaganda. Count Alexander Nazaryan among that group.
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“The flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one”
If you’ve ever had a successful friend you secretly envied and maybe even hated, you may be in startlingly good company: a new reading of an old letter between Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot indicates that the “flamboyant misanthrope and the restrained one” shared exactly this kind of frenemyship. Unrelated: a short recording of Eliot reading “The Naming of Cats.”
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“Daytripper is overrun with rich detail”
Dominic Umile takes a look at the Daytripper, a comic by Brazilian brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. The comic, which was selected recently for les Fauves d’Angoulême – the largest comics festival in Europe – concerns the “volley of riches and failure from the desk of an obituary writer.” As Umile notes, the art of obituary writing experienced quite a popularity surge in 2012. Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the regularity with which obituaries appeared on A1 in the paper, and the column even warranted the creation of its own dedicated Twitter account.
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What’s The Point?
There is good news for those of us whose dreams of artistic superstardom don’t seem to be panning out — a job listing from McSweeney’s seeking failed artists for an associate position. “We would hate for you to be pretentious,” the listing states, “but if you don’t regularly call other people pretentious — this might not be the job for you.”
Sea Like a Mirror
This little bit of found poetry courtesy of the Beaufort Wind Scale and Mallory Ortberg over at The Toast will have you reading your weather reports with a fresh set of eyes. If meteorology is your thing, here’s a link to the ten best weather events in all of fiction.
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