Recommended Reading: Chris Powers on the short fiction of John Updike. Pair with James Santel on Updike’s Collected Stories.
Ice Cream Etc.
It Is Shark Week, After All
Bret Easton Ellis is collaborating with Taxi Driver director Paul Schrader on a new “psychological horror” movie about sharks. Coincidentally, HTMLGiant‘s Blake Butler just revisited Ellis’ infamous novel American Psycho.
To the Moon and Back
David Seed looks back on more than two millennia of the moon in literature, from Galileo to Jules Verne to Johannes Kepler to Edgar Allan Poe.
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Early Birds
If you’ve ever wondered how old your favorite authors were when they hit their creative peaks, you’ll enjoy this graphic, which charts the ages at which well-known writers published their most famous works.
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Claire Vaye Watkins Takes Home the Dylan Thomas Prize
Kudos to Claire Vaye Watkins for taking home the Dylan Thomas Prize! Worth £30,000, the prize went to Watkins because, in the words of of the chair of the judging panel, she possesses “some of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary skill in the short story form.” (Read more about Watkins’s work in Geoff Mak’s review of her 2012 book Battleborn.)
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Brave New Books
“In the new environment, science fiction writers needed new formulas – or even better, needed to have the courage to operate without pre-cooked recipes of any sort. In short, science fiction needed to grow up and take on the adult world, in all its messiness and uncertainty.” Ted Gioia pens a paean to sci-fi writers of the 1960s. Among his recommendations (including a reading list of 64 works): Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch, whose larger oeuvre is considered here.
Dismissed As Coincidence
You’ll have to read this Curiosity to believe it! The surprise bestselling Time-Life series was wildly popular in the late 80s–but why? The answer is a bit less mysterious than one might have hoped. As a consolation, here’s a related essay from The Millions on conspiracy literature.
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Martin Amis in The Globe and Mail
Martin Amis is interviewed in The Globe and Mail: “All my novels are feminist from about 1980 on.”
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