We’re a little late to The Guardian‘s Families in Literature series, which includes essays on everyone from the March sisters to the Moomins and has been running for the last few weeks. A particular favorite is Moira Redmond‘s look at Brideshead Revisited‘s Flytes and the strange but true power of falling in love with an entire family, which pairs well with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s Modern Library Revue of the novel.
In love with the entire family
The Zen of Steve Jobs
A while back, I mentioned the prescient timing of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography Steve Jobs. As you await its publication, content yourself with Forbes and JESS3’s graphic novel The Zen of Steve Jobs.
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Hybrid Essays, DIAGRAM Essays
The deadline for DIAGRAM‘s essay contest is October 31, but mostly I just wanted an excuse to link to previous winner Cheyenne Nimes‘ “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.“
Alexander Chee: “I, Reader”
Alexander Chee has a lovely essay about books and technology up at The Morning News.
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Sacred Literature
“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
The Literate Frontman
Some of Jeff Tweedy‘s favorite writers: “I like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut. . . . I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free.” (In a Rolling Stone interview, unavailable online.)
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Mariama Bâ, Grande Dame of African Literature
Mariama Bâ, hailed as the pioneering feminist voice of a continent, was one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author.
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“In Argentina, it’s better to keep your mouth shut.”
Seven years ago, a stolen copy of Jorge Luis Borges’s Fervor de Buenos Aires was finally returned to Argentina’s National Library. But was it the same copy that had been taken fifteen years prior?
O the Flytes! And Howards End, and the ways Zadie Smith worked so much of this other-family-love into On Beauty and White Teeth.
There is something lovely about the way you can become part of another family growing up– a kind of access you rarely get again as a grown up. Maybe you get it in certain kinds of communal communities. Think I’ve heard it in the way veterans talk about their military experience, and think I’ve caught glimpses of it at artist residencies.
Look forward to reading all of these– thanks again.