Recommended Reading: Tyler Malone’s interview with Tom Muir, the site manager of the Thomas Wolfe memorial.
Going Home
The normative, the gendered body, etc. etc.
“The fiction of normative value(s) invests itself in the legitimation of the public sphere.” Finally, you don’t have to make up your own bullshit, with this nifty academic writing generator!
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They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war.
n+1 publishes a chilling personal account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, as the crisis mounts at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
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A Conservative Estimate
While makers of the graph admit that it’s no substitute for a real poll, according to a heatmap of political books purchased on Amazon in the United States, conservative books are more popular than their left-wing rivals. Another heatmap of note: a firm tracked the use of the F-bomb on twitter over the course of a day to see where America’s foulest mouths are concentrated.
Curiosities
It’s good to see James Wood covering Richard Price in The New Yorker; and even better to hear Price himself on Fresh Air.And also from The New Yorker, may we recommend Dan Chiasson’s wonderful essay on Frank O’Hara?Luc Sante’s blog pretty much has to be good.Derek, the guy who got both Max and Garth started blogging in the first place, is taking part in a big group blog at the Washington Post covering the Nationals baseball team and its new stadium.With features like this reconsideration of The Gnostic Gospels, the New York Sun is quietly building what may be the country’s best books section.”Growing Up Radical: An Interview with Peter Carey” (via scott)”On Magic Feelism” – n+1 considers Kevin Brockmeier’s The View from the Seventh LayerBoris Kachka profiles Jhumpa Lahiri in New YorkSurreal: “Garfield” minus Garfield. Alternatively, “Garfield” without Garfield’s thought bubbles.Nobody knows if the Kindle is a hit, AP says, but something is happening.A book graveyard in Russia.Languagehat’s specialty: a thoroughly edifying investigation of a phrase pulled out of thin air.American Book Review has developed their own lists of 100 Best Last Lines from Novels (PDF) and 100 Best First Lines from NovelsThe Boston Globe argues that Bringing Down the House, the basis for the new movie 21, is not a work of nonfiction.
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For the Sake of Cohesion
“Setting is often the last piece of the jigsaw. I start somewhere else—with a kind of a premise, a set of relationships, a theme—and I often have a long period when I can’t figure out where the story should be put down. I find myself going location hunting. Not just for a time and place, but also for a genre, if you like.” Kazuo Ishiguro on the Hazlitt podcast. For more things Ishiguro, here is our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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Is Korean Literature About to Break Out?
Thanks in part to Dalkey Archive Press’s recently announced Library of Korean Literature, works from Korea are poised to reach a broad and welcoming international audience as never before. Yet the country is still “pin[ing] for its own world-famous writer,” writes Craig Fehrman. Perhaps Kim Seong-kon is just what the doctor ordered.
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