There’s a certain narrative voice with an unspoken aim to exonerate the speaker from wrongdoing. It occurs in novels, though it’s most common in monologues, especially those which take up the entirety of a play. At Bookforum, Lurid and Cute author Adam Thirlwell lists a number of examples, including Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Wars I Have Seen by Gertrude Stein.
Believe Me
The Marvelous Words
Over at Catapult, Niina Pollari writes about translating Finnish literature in English. As she puts it, “If a thing you read gives you that sensation, it’s your responsibility to share the piece with someone.”
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William Blake(s)
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For Sale: Hemingway App, Doesn’t Work.
A new Hemingway App promises to trim the fat from your writing in a way that the Great Bearded One would’ve approved. The app uses various color codes to highlight writing written in the passive voice, writing that’s too hard to read, and also unnecessary adverbs or complex phrases. Sounds interesting enough, no? Well, the problem is that someone ran the Hemingway App on some actual Ernest Hemingway writing, and it turns out that Papa himself didn’t even write to the app’s standard.
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Brickjest
Infinite Jest may have "really taken on a foothold as the 'novel of ideas' of the late 20th and early 21st centuries" but now it's also a "novel of legos," courtesy of Kevin Griffith and his 11 year old son, Sebastian.
Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out "The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
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