Read our own Edan Lepucki’s great review of Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids? Then you might want to read Vivian Gornick’s complementary take on the book. In Bookforum, she reads Meghan Daum’s anthology as well as Kate Bolick’s Spinster, placing the two in a broader feminist context.
To Have or Have Not
Boss Fight Books
Boss Fight Books is a new series in the mold of the classic 33 1/3 model. In lieu of covering music albums, however, each Boss Fight book “will take a critical, creative, historical, and personal look at a single classic video game.” The first titles in the series will investigate Earthbound and Galaga, and they should be out by next December and January, respectively.
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RIP Harry Crews
Dwight Garner, Maud Newton, and Jason Diamond are among the many to mourn the passing of Harry Crews this past week. “Few writers,” Garner writes of Crews, “could touch his authority and muscle.”
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Unpublished DFW
This previously unpublished David Foster Wallace story, likely an excerpt from the Pale King manuscript, circulated as samizdat a couple of years back, but its reappearance – this time on some guy’s tumblr page – is a good excuse to link to it.
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Goodbye, Friday Night Lights
It’s been one week since the “Friday Night Lights” finale aired on network television, and it seems as though the entire internet is grieving. Two Grantland pieces: an oral history and a tongue-in-cheek analysis; an opinion piece juxtaposing Peter Berg‘s low-rated drama against “Glee”‘s success; and now even The Paris Review has thrown its hat into the ring. All of this, of course, comes on the heels of our own Sonya Chung‘s piece last April.
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The Return of Binge Reading
Novelist Ben Dolnick makes the case for indulging in a good binge-reading session.
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Unfinished Work
At the Fiction Writers Review, Robin Black sits down with contributor and Year in Reading alumna Nichole Bernier. The two discuss, among other things, Bernier’s new novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., as well as novels in which lengthy sections feature characters reading journal entries. (Bernier calls them “funhouse mirrors.”)
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