Homewrecker
Apparently There is a “There” There
Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland that “There’s no ‘there’ there.” If the latest novel by Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue, is any indication, not everyone agrees — the author set the book in the Oakland of 2004. At The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, Matt Feeney delves into the book’s racial politics.
Just a Tribute
Imagine that someone wrote fan fiction about you. Now imagine this fan fiction is not just about you, but inspired by selfies you posted on Tumblr. This is what happened to Arabelle Sicardi, who talks with Matthew J.X. Malady about the story she received, her fans and the weirdness of Internet fame.
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Elliott Holt Talks Anton Chekhov
“On the surface ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story,” writes Elliott Holt in a blog post for The Missouri Review. “[It’s] a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.”
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Patty and Walter, anyone?
In The New York Times Magazine, Heather Havrilesky cautions against “The Divorce Delusion,” or one of modern drama’s most unrealistic tropes. “Infidelity, a love child (or two), dalliances with prostitutes, lewd online behavior; we’ve watched so many spouses bounce back from hell,” she writes, “that maybe we’re beginning to believe that there’s no trauma so great that it can’t be quickly metabolized into a courageous determination to sally forth against the storm.”
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Darcy the Ripper
As part of the Funny Women feature at The Rumpus, Melissa Darcey wonders: what would it be like if Lifetime made movies out of classic novels?
Haruki Murakami: Literary Ambassador
Among Haruki Murakami’s many significant literary achievements is the fact that the author has – since the 1990s – become “responsible for triggering and fueling the Japanese literature boom in South Korea.” Indeed, by “creat[ing] bonds of shared emotions and literary sensibilities among tens of millions of people with different cultural and historical backgrounds,” writes Yoon Sang-In, “Murakami’s literary works have emerged as a great cultural asset that contributes to stability in [the East Asian] region.” (Bonus: Murakami’s latest book – which will be published in the States in 2014 – is flying off the shelves in Japan.)