Recommended Reading: “Another Tuesday” by Tanya Knox.
“This big, tangled thing”
The Oldest Joke
This week in book-related graphics: The New Yorker takes a poll and ranks the funniest jokes from the world's oldest joke book, the Philogelos.
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Strange and New
Last week, I pointed readers to an article about Michael Faber’s latest book and his decision to quit writing fiction. Now, in the Times Book Review, Marcel Theroux sizes up the novel, writing that “the reader is drawn through the book effortlessly, by the combination of incidental strangeness and the suspenseful handling of plot.”
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No, I only work there for the paycheck!
Jessica Francis Kane’s mother worked for Playboy back in the 1960s, a time “when it was an intellectual magazine as well as a pinup, when people really did subscribe to it for the articles.” Over at The Morning News, Kane shares a fascinating interview with her mother, and they talk about what it was “like to be a woman … in such a sexy workplace at such a weird time.”
The New Great Books
"How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?" Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
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If Charlotte Lucas were a cat
"If a modern film version of Pride and Prejudice were produced today, some of the main characters should be gay, Elizabeth and Darcy should not get married at the end, and Charlotte Lucas should be played by a tabby cat." Laura Fairchild reveals her students' ideas for new adaptations of Jane Austen novels while meditating on what Austen can or can't teach us about modern relationships.
Poetic Pugilists
For anyone searching for some weighty longreads about the current state of poetry, look no further than the lively (and longwinded) debate between Matvei Yankelevich and Marjorie Perloff sparked by the latter's piece, "Poetry on the Brink."
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He Also Plays Football Tonight at 8pm
They've called him a sports icon, a "national nightmare," an author, and a punchline. They've questioned the backlash against him, and tracked his particular brand of "muscular Christianity." Coincidental religious symbolism has been noted. Yet so far nothing has come close to genius of Jimmy Fallon's rendition of Tim Tebow as... TeBowie.