“Art isn’t a footrace. No one comes in first place. Greatness is not a universally agreed-upon value. … America isn’t one story. It’s a layered and diverse array of identities, individual and collective, forged on contradictory realities that are imbued with and denied privilege and power. Our obsession with the Great American Novel is perhaps evidence of the even greater truth that it’s impossible for one to exist. As Americans, we keep looking anyway.” Cheryl Strayed and Adam Kirsch discuss the Great American Novel in this week’s New York Times Bookends. For a slightly different take, consider the 9 novels our experts chose as the Greatest American novels, from Moby-Dick to The Godfather.
Great, No, Greatest
A Budding Fan
In 1964, A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin wrote Marvel icon Stan Lee a fan letter.
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Uncommon Language
Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”
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And She’s A Mary Ann
“You heard me: I said, Ann M. Martin is queeeeer.” A longtime Baby-Sitter’s Club fan gets her mind blown. Pair with this celebration of Martin’s oeuvre.
The New Translators
Since they got married and began working 33 years ago, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear have translated around 30 works of Russian literature, from The Brothers Karamazov to Doctor Zhivago. Now their interview with the Paris Review is available online from the Literary Hub, and this seems as good a time as ever to bring up that constant debate: who’s greater, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
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More Barthes
In part because I loved Sam Anderson’s riff on Barthes in this weekend’s NYT Magazine so much, I was thrilled to see Maud Newton tweet this link this 2010 article on Barthes’s handwriting, featuring a slideshow of note cards Barthes used to compose his Mourning Diary.
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Offshore Seinfeld
One Indian call center’s “culture training” involves the study of Seinfeld episodes, writes Andrew Marantz. Hopefully they don’t screen the Harold Pinter-inspired episode, “The Betrayal.” Meanwhile, Joshua Kurp has located most of George’s ex-girlfriends.