“Maybe our anointed literary books just have to be earnest ones because earnest ones showcase that soupçon of intelligence. Maybe humor isn’t felt to indicate a genuine commitment to looking smart.” Year in Reading alum Lydia Millet talks with Jenny Offill about humor writing, what books are “anointed” as modern classics, and Millet’s new book, Mermaids in Paradise.
Earnest vs. Humorous
Bart the Streamer
Following the news that The Simpsons will now be available for online streaming for the first time, Myles McNutt makes the case that the world needs a Simpsons Clip Database. He justifies his sentiment by pointing out that “in a world where Simpsons references are a language for a certain generation, the ability to stream this content has tremendous value, and could push use of an app that otherwise would struggle to compete with services like Netflix.”
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Recommended Reading is Here!
Starting strong out of the gate with a new short story from Ben Marcus, Electric Lit's latest project, Recommended Reading is here! There's also a single sentence animation and a letter from the editor. And best of all, it's published directly to Tumblr, though you can also read the story on your Kindle or ePub reader.
Skateboarding’s Art and Craft
Joel Rice's "Flip" column for McSweeney's discusses the culture of skateboarding. This week he interviews Cole Louison, author of The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding.
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Particularly Piquant Peppers
Move over Naga Viper. There’s a new hottest pepper in town, and it's called the Carolina Reaper.
Bring it Back! Literature In the Olympics by 2016!
Fun Fact: "Literature" was an Olympic event until 1948. In fact, several other events were also listed under the umbrella of "Sporting Art," as Olympic historian John MacAloon points out to NPR. For example, W. B. Yeats' brother, Jack Butler Yeats, won the "Mixed Painting" silver in 1924; some people even won "Medals for Making Medals!"
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Tuesday New Release Day: Tuil; Curtright; Young; Hall; Bukowski
New this week: The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil; The Burned Bridges of Ward, Nebraska by Eileen Curtright; Shock by Shock by Dean Young; The Selected Poems of Donald Hall; and On Cats by Charles Bukowski. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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One Of Us, One Of Us
"But even among its peers, Louie is an outlier. It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club...we are living in the iGeneration, in which the self is projected back toward the world via social media. But whereas many Americans weave their public personas from curated chains of cultural signifiers — think of the popular web platform tumblr, where users 'express themselves' by posting digital reproductions of existing images — [Louis] C.K. aims for something more penetrating, a filmic representation of his own psyche," claims the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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