“Wallace’s fiction contains enormous cruelty… But it is also a deeply moral body of work. Its difficulties, and many of its cruelties, exist for specific reasons. Whether Wallace’s fraught projects are successes or failures is up to the individual, but these are judgments that all serious readers should want to make for themselves.” Chris Power considers David Foster Wallace‘s short stories in an essay for The Guardian and argues that after Infinite Jest they just might be the most important work he produced.
David Foster Wallace In Brief
Welcome, Ismail!
The Millions is thrilled to welcome a new staff writer, Ismail Muhammad, whose first piece for the site publishes today. (You may have seen Ismail's work at Zyzzyva and the Los Angeles Review of Books previously.) He splits his time between Los Angeles and Oakland, where he's currently working on a dissertation and a novel. Find him on Twitter @trapmotives and Instagram @trapmotifs.
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True Crime, True Empathy
Why are women the primary consumers of true crime literature while an overwhelming majority of the genre showcases violence towards women? Over at Hazlitt, Casey Johnston has a few ideas about this seemingly irreconcilable paradox. Here is a complementary piece by Ujala Sehgal for The Millions on the female True Detectives of literature.
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New Fiction by a Classic Writer
New Directions has just released The Complete Stories of Brazilian legend Clarice Lispector, newly translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser. There are eight stories in the collection that had never before appeared in English: "Covert Joy," "Remnants of Carnival," "Brasília," "Beauty and the Beast or The Big Wound, "One Day Less" (one of the two final stories left in manuscript at Lispector's death), "Gertrudes Asks for Advice," "Another Couple of Drunks," and "The Escape." Check out Magdalena Edwards's Millions review of the collection.
The Great Tranquility
"Yehuda Amichai’s genius lies in how—to borrow from his own language—he makes metaphor 'useful.' He thinks metaphorically, and in so doing he makes stories of them, treating his likenesses as if they were not metaphorical but animated literalisms. That’s why, I suspect, his metaphors have not merely poetic power but practical vitality, in the way that a horse is not only alive but usefully alive." Every time James Wood publishes a big profile in The New Yorker, it's worth a read; this week's essay on the "secular psalmist" and poet Yehuda Amichai is no different.
The Awl’s Poetry Section
Poet Mark Bibbins is the author of The Dance of No Feelings, and he is also the poetry editor for The Awl. So far he's published poems from Michael Shiavo, Rebecca Keith, Ben Lerner, and many others.
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How to read the New Yorker this summer
Starting today and lasting until the end of the summer, The New Yorker is completely free online, including archives back to 2007. What to read? To start off, try searching the fiction page for, say, George Saunders. There's that famous Lawrence Wright piece on Scientology. Or feel free to consult the magazine's own roundup. But I happen to be most impressed by this grandaddy of all longform articles on six survivors of Hiroshima (subscription required).
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Creeping Out the Invited Guests
It doesn't get much better than James Wood on Joy Williams: "Nothing is stranger (and funnier) in Williams’s work than her details. Like her forms, they only resemble conventional realist details, an atmosphere perhaps encouraged by her flat, functional sentences (“They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink”). The details are frequently surreal, magical, hallucinogenic, delivered in a cool, dispassionate, routine manner."
Self-Publishing… With Penguin
Want to be published by Penguin? For $99 (£60), you can! As stated in this Guardian article, "Penguin USA will provide the service through its genre-fiction online community, Book Country, which launched in May offering wannabe authors the opportunity to post their work online and receive feedback." The news comes on the heels of Amazon's announcement that Amanda Hocking has become the second self-published author to tally 1,000,000 Kindle sales.
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