“These conversations push Leonard outside his sister’s house and put him on a course complete with time travel, an unreadable ancient text, Jewish Mysticism, and an attractive reference librarian. And here’s where the trouble starts.” On Rachel Cantor’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario.
Real Talk
William Gass, 1924-2017
“He was a glutton for books who treated each text as a plate he was required to clean.” Author and critic William Gass died this week at 93, reports The Washington Post. The recipient of three National Book Critics Circle awards for criticism and four Pushcart prizes, Gass was awarded the PEN/Nabakov Award for lifetime achievement in 2000. See our reviews of Middle C, a novel that took Gass almost 20 years to finish, and his most recent essay collection Life Sentences, which amply demonstrated his background as “a former philosophy professor, but more appropriately a philosopher of the word and an esthete.” We were also lucky enough to have him pen a Year in Reading entry for us back in 2009: “I miss the leisure that let me read just for fun, not to critique, or pronounce, or even to put on a list, but simply to savor,” Gass lamented. Nonetheless, he continued,“I do, from time to time, pick up old friends who never disappoint but will promise me a page or two of pleasure between art and ordinary life.”
“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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Septuagenarian Akutagawa Prize Winner
Paging Sonya Chung and the rest of the Bloom gang: one of this year’s Akutagawa Prize winners is a seventy-five year old woman named Natsuko Kuroda. How’s that for a Post-40 Bloomer? (h/t Dustin Kurtz)
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Cynthia Nixon to Play Emily Dickinson
Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon has been tapped to play Emily Dickinson in a new biopic from Terence Davies. In a lucky break for that film’s stylists and wardrobe people, the number of extant photographs of Dickinson has recently doubled.