Azar Nafisi thinks the best way to pin down a culture is to take a look at its canonical works of literature. In The Republic of Imagination, as Adam Begley details in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, she examines a few of America’s classic novels, including Babbitt, Huck Finn and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. You could also read Jonathan Russell Clark’s review of the book for The Millions.
Litterae Publicae
Mother Tongue
“Or again, does a ‘newsagent’ really need to become a ‘news dealer,’ a ‘flyover’ an ‘overpass,’ a ‘parcel’ a ‘package,’ or in certain circumstances ‘between’ ‘among’ and ‘like’ ‘such as’?” How to sound American.
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“In the future, you’ll be so lightheaded”
Recommended Reading: this collection of short pieces by Rumpus readers on the subject of magic.
An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
Counter-revolutionary
It goes without saying that a man dubbed “the father of modern conservatism” might stir up contentious debates. In his heyday, Edmund Burke was so renowned as a thinker that his detractors tried to place him at the center of conspiracy theories. In a new biography, Jesse Norman tackles Burke’s thought in its entirety — a task which, in Charles Hill’s view, is nothing if not un-Burkean.
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From the Ground Up
Recommended Reading: Ann Friedman on Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl.
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