Last week, I wrote about Josh Weil and Mike Harvkey’s joint book tour, which sees the two driving a Prius across America to promote their latest novels. Now, in their latest dispatch, they reflect on the differences between writers like themselves and midcentury writers like Andre Dubus and Norman Mailer.
Different Times
The Perils of “Showrooming”
Emma Straub, whose Year in Reading piece ran this week, has written a great article on the perils of “showrooming.”
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A 19th-Century It Girl
Rachel Vorona Cote takes a look at Letitia Landon's many identities and how she went on to become a cautionary tale about talented women.
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Sarah Palin, White Goddess
N+1’s Marco Roth turns in an ambitious and historically nuanced exploration of white grievance in a putatively postracial America. Highly recommended.
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Teaching in Translation
Over at Words Without Borders, Marguerite Feitlowitz writes on teaching the art of literary translation. As she puts it, “Bringing texts from one place to another, from one tongue, context, history, and human body to another, is itself a political act. We can tell the history of the world through the history of when major texts have been translated—and where, why, and by whom.” Pair with this Millions piece on literary translators at work.
An Amis For Us All
If this was the Summer of Martin Amis (which seems to have been the case), then prepare yourselves for the coming Fall of Kingsley Amis, courtesy of the folks at the New York Review of Books Classics and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Writing From the Other Wordsworth
The Oxford University Press blog has a never-before-published poem by Dorothy Wordsworth. She constructed the piece in 1839 while suffering from arteriosclerosis and dementia because “there was a therapeutic dimension both in creating and ‘performing’ poetry,” writes Lucy Newlyn.
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