There’s an old story that states that Marcel Proust met James Joyce for five unremarkable minutes at a dinner party. Artistically significant though it may have been, it had less geopolitical significance than another famous meeting a hundred years earlier, in which Napoleon went out of his way to pay a visit to Goethe. As a new biography of the French emperor details, Napoleon couldn’t understand why Goethe admired Shakespeare.
Shop Talk
When Life Gives You Rob Ford, What More Do You Require?
PSA: Little Brother is releasing a special issue entitled Everything Is Fine. The kicker? The issue is dedicated to fiction about embattled Toronto mayor Rob Ford. (P.S. If you aren’t familiar with LB, it’s the magazine run by Millions Tumblr-er emeritus Emily M. Keeler.)
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Make It New
“After ten years of painting, that is to say ten years of using an abstract, invented language, writing stories was the closest I had come to working in the realm of ‘realism.’ It was the most direct I had ever been in my art. Perhaps the most direct I had ever been. But, as I learned from the comments of my peers in workshop (‘this isn’t a story,’ ‘this is poetry,’ ‘what is this’), my writing was something other than what we referred to as literary realism. By which I mean, the writing many have come to believe most accurately represents life.” Susan Steinberg asks what happened to American experimental writing.
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Anna Quindlen on Harper Lee
Anna Quindlen at The Huffington Post is one of the many writers reflecting on the greatness of To Kill A Mockingbird in honor of the book’s 50th anniversary.
A Is for Apple
“I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees.” Apples, plastic bags, teeth In The Guardian, Karl Ove Knausgaard attempts to explain the world to his unborn baby, object by object. Pair with our review of his epic, My Struggle.
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