Recommended reading: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the new modesty of literary criticism and the complicated relationship between texts, critics, and politics. For more on the balance between art and politics, look no further than Jonathan Clarke‘s Millions essay, “Alive with Disagreement and Dissent.”
A New Modesty
Pulp Saint
From The Atlantic comes the case for canonizing G.K. Chesterton, the "Catholic convert and an oracular man of letters, a pneumatic cultural presence, an aphorist with the production rate of a pulp novelist."
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Fuck Yeah, NYRB
Who says publishers have weak brands? Someone loves the NYRB Classics so much they started a Tumblr blog about them. It is called, appropriately, Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics!
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Trystero Coffee
At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg has coffee with Thomas Pynchon--well, not exactly...
Can You Learn to Love the Adverb?
The saying goes that "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," but at Beyond the Margins Robin Black makes the opposite argument. "I want you to love adverbs," she begins, but "more than that, I want you to believe, as I do, that adverbs are the part of speech that best captures the human condition."
The Perils of Contact
The Perils of 'Contact Me': in an essay in the New York Times, Ben Yagoda wonders whether authors have made themselves too accessible to readers.
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J.E. Fishman on The New York Times
On The Nervous Breakdown this week, J.E. Fishman considers the book review practices of The New York Times: "My view is very much eastern, very much old school, where a book review from the Times was the only sure sign that an author had arrived. But maybe it’s time to rethink that, and this rethinking has been long overdue."
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