Looking for a new summer home? Something with an impressive literary pedigree? You’re in luck! Now you can buy the house where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gastsby for the low, low price of $3.8 million.
Living Like Fitzgerald
The Joan Didion Documentary
There is going to be a documentary about Joan Didion. We repeat: a documentary about Joan Didion. This is not a drill. Watch the opening trailer and consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign here, and be sure to read our own Michael Borne's review of Blue Nights and S.J. Culver's Millions essay on "Getting Out: Escaping with Joan Didion."
Apply for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship!
February 1st is the application deadline for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing. It's a two year post-graduate fellowship that offers $40,000 per year while you work on completing a second book or starting a first. Apply now!
Choose Your Own Apocalypse: Skynet or Stingrays
With the help of Our Final Hour author Martin Rees, Cambridge will soon open a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The Centre will investigate the threats posed by “artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.” To my ears, this sounds an awful lot like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was memorably depicted in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs.”
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Reading Lists Amended
Remember when Esquire released their not-so-great list of eighty books every man should read? Well, they have amended their list to eighty books every person should read, asking advice from “eight female literary powerhouses” including Roxane Gay, Michiko Kakutani and Lauren Groff. Our own Janet Potter recommends twenty-eight books you should read if you want to.
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Cheap Night Club, South Side of Chicago
Year in Reading alumnus Thomas Mallon’s foreword to the new edition of John O’Hara’s 1940 novel Pal Joey is available in The Paris Review Daily. Mallon predicts that “
O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival—outdated
enough to be exotic—may at last be upon us.”
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
L.A.-based readers won't want to miss this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held this year on the USC campus. Millions staff writer Patrick Brown will be moderating a panel discussion about bookselling, "From the Front Register," on Saturday at 12:30 pm. At 2:30 that same day, I'll be on a panel facilitated by Lizzie Skurnick called "Fiction: The Long and Short of It." My fellow panelists are Yiyun Li and occasional Millions contributor Victoria Patterson. Go here for details and to order panel tickets (just $1 each)!
“We need a theory of jerks.”
"Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks?" If so--as this insightful if somewhat confidence-shattering piece at Aeon suggests--the jerk may be you.
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