“The plot, obviously, is kind of difficult to explain, like an earnest, pared-down, hipster Foucault’s Pendulum. Not only are all of the plot turns above laid out through a multiframed narrative, replete with several people’s footnotes, but the events are interwoven with disquisitions on the history of map-making, Situationist philosophy, urban planning, and pop music.” At Slate, our own Lydia Kiesling reads Catie Disabato’s The Ghost Network. (ICYMI, Dan Lopez reviewed the book for The Millions.)
Lacework
More Praise for Alina Bronsky
Following up on our look at the German literary landscape, Three Percent publishes a glowing review of Alina Bronsky's Broken Glass Park.
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Book Art V. White Supremacy
A controversial new book art exhibit is set to open at the Mansfield Library of the University of Montana on January 7th. The show, "Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate," comprises works by 100 artists all of which are made out 4000 books published by a white supremacist organization, The Church of the Creator, and sold to the Montana Human Rights Network by a disaffected member. Read the strange story of the genesis of the exhibition and see some of the works here.
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Homecoming
Inaugural poet Richard Blanco talks to NPR about the experience.
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The Primetime Magicians
Jonathan Franzen and Chad Harbach aren't the only two authors adapting their works for television. Lev Grossman is working on an hour-long Fox series based on his novel The Magicians.
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Elephant’s Memory
Over at Aeon, Alana Massey writes about memory and how the internet archives personal data. In her own words, “Because the archiving technology captures only snapshots of a site at a given time, results might not be an exact replica of the site as it was. As I learned from the fragments of our site, things such as embedded media might be missing and scripts are unlikely to work. After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory.”
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Am I Special?
“Perhaps I will just go underground and live a quiet life of desperation. I’ve heard mumblings about a place called ‘Social Media Manager.’ It seems like a nice place where all people my age go for a while. Just until things start to make sense again.” Nobody knows the throes of existential angst quite like a twenty-something. Here’s a plea for help from one such twenty-something over at McSweeney’s.
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