“You could say that Fancy is about a couple of comical old kooks stuck in a dismal town finding creative ways of making themselves (and some luckless bystanders) crazy … and you wouldn’t be wrong. But you could also say that it’s the story of the composition of the manifesto of a bizarre and protean (protozoan?) order of being in which we’re all just patterns mistaking ourselves for people.” In a piece for BOMB Magazine, Scott Esposito interviews Jeremy M. Davies about Bernhard, Olive Garden, writing Fancy and reintroducing humor into modernist literature. Their conversation pairs well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s look at, well, the conversations of BOMB interviews.
Bernhard and Olive Garden
“Nothing about that day was his plan.”
The Guardian has a new story by Hilary Mantel up on its website. (In case you missed it: the author won a second Man Booker prize.)
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“Books are an existential crisis”
Kyle Winkler, in an editorial for Vouched Books (which I've mentioned previously), writes that "books are an existential crisis" because we can't possibly read them all.
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Go Go Gadget Classical Compositions
Fun Fact: the Inspector Gadget theme song is actually based on Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Seriously.
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Nabokov’s Unpublished Letters
Nearly 300 previously unpublished love letters written by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera Slonim from 1923 to 1975 will be published next year by Knopf.
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Schools and Lunches from Around the Globe
Photographer Julian Germain put together an interesting slideshow of school classrooms from around the world. Related: school lunches from around the world.
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Avoiding “Chick-Lit”
Chick authors who avoid the "chick-lit" stigma.