Recommended viewing: a trailer for the upcoming David Foster Wallace movie, an adaptation of David Lipsky‘s memoir of his road-trip with the author, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, is now available online.
Jason Segel’s DFW
Seems About Right
“Post-truth” has been named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries, reports The Guardian. Considered an adjective, its definition is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The Dictionaries report its first use in 1992 by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in relation to Iran-Contra and the first Gulf War. And we thought Colbert’s “truthiness” was funny.
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The Humanity of Hobbits
Are hobbits human? Matthew Yglesias asks this question at Slate and mines J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to find out. The answer is yes; they are just shorter.
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The Day After Hun’s Day
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Hard to Recall
“Thinking about her life is like sifting ashes. You believe you see the clear outline of a message, but it inevitably disintegrates before you can be sure of its sense. The mantle of a ‘rediscovered writer’ has never settled firmly around [her] shoulders; she has a way of resisting the platitudes of remembering.” Michelle Dean on the writer Nella Larsen.
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Fin
How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful — she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung’s essay on literary endings.)
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Post-Maidan
Recommended Reading: Marci Shore on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar in modern Ukraine.
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