I’ve written before about Matthew Jockers‘s claim, as reported and presented by the Paris Review, that there are only about 6 plots in fiction. Now Dan Piepenbring returns to the Review to respond to critics who and attempt to answer the questions “is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms?”
Six Plots Part II
Poems on Poems
“Of course, his word-pictures don’t define the art of poetry—nor are they meant to. In part they exemplify it; in part provide a warning that such an art eludes straightforward setting out in words.” On Horace’s and Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica.
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How Meta a Work is Man
A Shakespearean consulted for Arthur Phillips‘ buzzed-about new novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, reviews…The Tragedy of Arthur. In which he appears. Alongside “Arthur Phillips.”
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Bookless in Laredo
As of last week, Laredo, Texas, a city of 250,000 people has no bookstore. A sign of the coming apocalypse or a great business opportunity? You decide.
Reread Nation
Why do we reread novels obsessively as children but hardly ever as adults? At The Morning News, Clay Risen discusses why rereading appeals to children so much. “It was a residual sense of wonder, left over long after I had accepted that the reality on the page and the reality beyond it are distinct.” Pair with: Our essay on the pleasures and perils of rereading.
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New DeLillo
Details are just now starting to trickle out about a new Don DeLillo book out early next year. In Point Omega, DeLillo “takes on the secret strategist in America’s war machine,” according to publisher Scribner.