Recommended viewing: John Darnielle talks about his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, in a video for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Interview with John Darnielle
This Week in Russian Lit.
The Morning News has just launched a series on contemporary Russian literature. For this week’s installment Anna Starobinets provides an exerpt of her debut manuscript, An Awkward Age, and chats about her writing with Elizabeth Kiem. In the New Yorker, Sally McGrane profiles Boris Akunin, Russian writer of potboilers and political dissident.
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Emo Allan Poe
Quoth Edgar Allan Poe or an emo band? Take this trickier-than-it-looks quiz, and decide for yourself.
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People of the Opposite Sex, Am I Right?
The Atlantic has launched a new section — The Sexes — that deals with issues of gender.
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Football Book Club: ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Football Book Club is back from its relaxing bye week — and in preparation of the impending Environmental End Times, these truly decent, patriotic human beings are reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. So pick up your copy today, read along, and learn how we’re fucking up the planet in ways you never even imagined possible. Also: if this week’s book is making you feel slightly depressed and/or down in the dumps and/or bummed, check back with FBC all week for essays on Speak by Louisa Hall.
Anne Frank’s Legacy
“Nathan Englander’s characters have invented ‘the Anne Frank game’ whose major question is ‘who would hide you if there were another Holocaust.’ By making this a game, the characters demonstrate their affective distance from the event, but at the same time Englander illustrates that the Holocaust remains a touchstone for the marijuana-smoking, Orthodox Jews who bring the game to their secular Jewish friends.” On the fictional afterlife of Anne Frank.
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