Flyboys
On Pain
Recommended Reading: How to write about trauma.
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Why so Serious?
Jonathan Lethem thinks his work is taken too seriously. "Well, I was just watching Richard Pryor, and he says, 'When you’re dating a white woman, and people don’t like it, you can’t really pretend. You can’t go, "Oh, she’s not with me."' 'You write the big, ambitious books, right?' Well, I guess they are," he said in an interview with Salon. He also discusses being equated with Jonathan Franzen and his new novel, Dissident Gardens.
Very Secret and Odd
Recommended Reading: Søren Kierkegaard and Anna Akhmatova overheard whispering on a stairwell.
Disappearing Welsh
If there existed a trophy for the ugliest-looking but prettiest-sounding language, then the 721,700 living Welsh speakers would boast more championships than Alabama’s football team. Yes, the Welsh. They of the villages Llangefni and Llanfairfechan. (To say nothing of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.) Wouldn’t it be a shame for such a language to disappear? For writing in this language to stop being published? Stanford’s Cynthia Haven thinks so.
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Against Captain Underpants
Renaissance Learning has released its annual report on what children are reading. The NYDaily News books blog takes offense at some of the more popular books named in the report, suggesting that kids and teens deserve to be challenged by better literature. The Huffington Post mines through the report to discover that American teenagers on average are still reading at or near the level of fifth graders.
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David Simon Working on a Pogues Musical
The Wire creator David Simon is at work on a Pogues musical, reports Rolling Stone. Where will they possibly find a Broadway star with the right teeth to play Shane MacGowan?