If you’ve been on the Internet at any point in the last few weeks, you’re probably aware that Twin Peaks is coming back. The seminal (and seminally weird) show by David Lynch will return for nine episodes in 2016. At The Nervous Breakdown, Joshua Lyons explains what the show meant to him, with the help of visual proof that he copied Bobby Briggs’s hair.
Tales of a Fanboy
On Fear and Dread
Mary Ruefle, author of the forthcoming Madness, Rack, and Honey, wrote a poetic essay on the subject of fear. It’s chock full of lines like this one about why she likes the word dread more than the word fear: “because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there.”
So many wobbly assumptions
Laura Miller pokes some holes in that Dartmouth study about how little classic literature appears to be influencing contemporary writers.
Viet Thanh Nguyen and the Refugee’s Narrative
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses the complexity behind refugee narratives and resisting the temptation of shallow representation.
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I’m Good
In a way, this is the opposite of an interview: a series of conversations held exclusively between chatbots. At n+1, Nick Levine constructs dialogue straight out of Beckett. Pair with Houmon Barekat on Finn Brunton’s history of spam.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Toibin, Oswalt, Rachman
Colm Tóibín’s new collection The Empty Family is out today, as is comedian Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. New in paperback: 2010 fave The Imperfectionists. Many more new books to look forward to, of course, in our massive preview published this week.
Amazon Shows Off ‘Kindle for the Web’
Amazon is battling the multi-platform capabilities of Google’s new ebookstore with its new “Kindle for the Web.” The demo makes it look pretty easy on the eyes. Kindle books were already accessible on a number of mobile platforms. What’s new here is taking the Kindle capabilities to the PC.
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So lonely
Another Tumblog is being made into a book, this time with a little help from David Shields. Jeff, One Lonely Guy is a collection of recorded conversations and correspondences that were the result of one guy, Jeff Ragsdale , posting a flyer with his phone number all over NYC. Shields is helping Ragsdale arrange the responses he received for publication as an ebook. Ragsdale isn’t, according to his Tumblr, all that lonely anymore. Which makes me wonder how Mark Z. Danielewski’s fairing on OK Cupid?
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