There are all kinds of arguments for reading the canon (Italo Calvino‘s come to mind) but why should we spend time reading untested contemporary authors? Tim Parks tackles this question, with a little help from Virginia Woolf, for The New York Review of Book‘s blog, and his argument pairs well with Guy Patrick Cunningham‘s Millions essay on reading the classics.
Reading New Books
Fiction by Wes Anderson
Before making films, Wes Anderson used to write fiction. His university literary journal Analecta posts a short story he wrote as an undergraduate in 1989. Did he make the right career choice? (via The Paris Review Daily)
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Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
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Unread Books
Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, cops to a list of classic books he's never read. Among them: Jane Eyre, Blood Meridian, and Millions Hall-of-Famer Stoner.
The Point Issue 9: On Art, Commerce, and the Prescience of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
New at The Point: an incisive look at Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that calls it "the most prescient American novel of the past fifteen years” and asks,"is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture?” The latest print issue features this essay as well as a symposium on privacy, and will be launched at a release party in Hyde Park on Saturday night.
Reading Proust
For the Atlantic, Sarah Boxer recounts her experience reading In Search of Lost Time on her cell phone. Pair with Hannah Gersen’s year of reading Proust.
Kindred
The new novel by Colm Tóibín draws largely from the author’s memories of his father passing away when he was young. In a Guardian essay, the author writes about his discovery that literature can be a vessel for grief, with a nod to the writer and Dublin mainstay Mary Lavin. If you’d like to learn more about Tóibín's fiction, you can read our pieces on his books.
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Teenage Scum Tollbooth
We couldn't get enough of Mallory Ortberg's "Dirtbag Hamlet," and now she presents "Dirtbag Phantom Tollbooth." "KING AZAZ: Please, my dear boy! Without these sisters, our kingdom will decay into chaos MILO: sisters eh nice."
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