“How could we possibly trust any creature that comes into the world wearing such a caul of ambiguity? That’s “essayists.” Four hundred and four years later, they continue to flourish.” John Jeremiah Sullivan offers a loose history of the essay, essayists, and all their many contradictions in a piece for The New Yorker.
“A Caul of Ambiguity”
We’re Going with “Greatest”
"The actress and author of a new children’s book, The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit, has contemplated throwing the writer Michel Houellebecq across a room.” Great NYT subhead or greatest NYT subhead?
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Familiar Ground
Home in the Apocalypse
"My mind moves toward apocalypse fictions the way we think about a forgotten friend, or a partner that’s left us—grief becomes its own comfort." Adnan Khan writes for Hazlitt about how apocalypse fictions mirror the immigrant experience and vice versa.
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David Shields on the Colbert Report
Watch David Shields on the Colbert Report last week -- Colbert: "Are you the Vanilla Ice of novels?" Shields: "Precisely."
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Pirate King
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's capture was widely publicized last month, but this Business Week profile of the man's ascent to "Pirate King" makes for a super entertaining (and informative) read.
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Maureen Corrigan on Lacuna
NPR's Maureen Corrigan applauds Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna for "single-handedly keeping consumer zest alive for the literary novel," as "the only literary novel caught in the cross hairs" of the price wars waged by Wal-mart, Amazon, and Target against booksellers (the others being genre novels). As for the book itself: "I wish I could say she also deserves kudos for writing a spectacular work of fiction..."
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Harlequin History
"How did a humble Canadian publisher—which got its start reprinting other companys' books—become the name most associated with romance? It's a long story, involving a peripatetic former fur trader and his opinionated socialite wife, a Procter-and-Gamble-trained Harvard MBA, some jilted Americans and a whole crowd of damned scribbling women." From Pictorial comes the story of "How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance."
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