According to a recent survey, Danes are the happiest people in the world. This came as a surprise, writes Mathilde Walter Clark, to most of her fellow Scandinavians, who know very well the unhappier elements of their daily lives. The problem, she suggests, is that words like “happiness,” “ambition” and “contentment” have subtly different meanings in different languages — in other words, happiness in Denmark isn’t the same thing as happiness in America. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel’s review of the Danish writer Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale.
Not Exactly Rotten
Hell is Other People
The Morning News posts a terrific (if slightly ingenuous?) take on the vacuity of the poet's life in NYC: Frank O'Hara it ain't. Whether this is a failure of the city, or merely of the poet, is an open question. (via The Book Bench).
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Didion: Cool and Manly?
The Atlantic reviews the first full-length biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty, to be released August 25th. The biography “looks at the author’s legacy of cool.” Related: Franklin Strong’s essay on “The Manliness of Joan Didion” in The Millions.
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Basically, Salman Rushdie is the man.
"Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside." Cheers to that, Salman Rushdie.
Tuesday New Release Day: Carey, Mieville, Murakami
New today are Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears and China Mieville's Railsea. And Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 is now out in a snazzy three-volume boxed-set paperback edition.
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Someone You’re Not
We're all frauds on the internet! Ann Leary at The Literary Hub takes a look at why online relationships tend to falter in the "real world." Here are a couple of complementary friendship-related essays from The Millions.
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Writing for the Exposure
You may recall that a one Sam Pink bared all in an ad for his new book. At the LARB, Michael Bible reviews that new book, which he says is a novel worth baring for.
Happy Birthday, W.C.W.
William Carlos Williams's birthday was this last week, and Adam Kirsch writes about the poet for New York Review of Books. Though he argues that "today it would be hard to find a reader of poetry who would not acknowledge William Carlos Williams as one of the major American modernists" Kirsch still has to face the question, "why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of [Williams] still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?"
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