“Today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable leather jackets, their claws for manicures.” Becca Rothfeld writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the “the distressingly human lives of vampires today.” Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson‘s “Ethical Vampires” and “Ethical Vampires, part II.”
“Distressingly human”
“The Migrant is Not A Metaphor”
Over at The New York Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reviews two books about migration, A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.
Grief Is The Thing
In his 2015 Year in Reading, Garth Risk Hallberg told us about Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, a quasi-poem/novel/memoir which “you will quickly forget is weird as hell, because it is also beautiful as hell, moving as hell, and funny as hell.” Though the book isn’t slated for stateside release for another few months, there is a fantastic review over at the London Review of Books that’s well worth the read.
●
●
Activist Art
Over at Hyperallergic, art, activism, and literature collide in When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World by Greg Jobin-Leeds and AgitArte. Pair with our own Bill Morris’s review of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.
●
●
Goodbye, Byes
Recommended Reading: Jason Arthur’s farewell to goodbye-to-New-York essays.
The Atlantic Remembers Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s birthday was yesterday (176!), and The Atlantic took a moment to remember his gifts to the magazine, a relationship which began in 1869, and got Twain twice as much pay as other Atlantic contributors.
●
●
Sick Burns
Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh was asked by his son’s school to sign a permission slip in order to read Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451. Hilarity ensued. Also: remember that time a bunch of parents tried to censor The Lorax?
●
●
While a Fox Was Brown
This interactive guide to the demise (or, rather, the rise) of the passive voice by Vijith Assar at McSweeney’s is every bit as fascinating as it is troubling. This notable piece from The Millions by Fiona Maazel should act as a nice grammatical complement.