150 New Mark Twains

Recommended Reading: Cahal Milmo on the death of Marsha Mehran.

In a piece reminiscent of Talk of the Nation's "You Can't Possibly Read It All, So Stop Trying" episode, A D Jameson tracks every film he's watched over a fifteen year span, and then discusses the data for HTMLGiant. Choice line (which could easily apply to literature, too): "The more you watch from the present day, the more garbage you’re bound to see—but your conclusions will be your own. Conversely, the further back you go, the more you’ll be guided by the opinions of others. (If nothing else, what’s available will be largely determined by what’s remained popular.)"

An interview with Tom Bissell in which he drops this gem while talking about John Jeremiah Sullivan and Geoff Dyer: "I prefer to think of that kind of nonfiction as a voice whispering to you in the night. "

“What [Vladimir] Nabokov is actually doing in Lolita is deliberately drawing on all manner of anti-Semitic propaganda, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nazi caricatures of the Jewish ‘type,’ to create in Humbert Humbert the anti-Semitic cliché of legend, rather as, say, Chaucer draws on medieval misogynist writings to create in the figure of the Wife of Bath the archetypal shrew of his male audience’s nightmares.”