Joshua Cohen’s new novel has gotten a lot of attention for its odd relationship with Internet culture. In The New Republic, he talks with Gideon Lewis-Kraus in a Gchat, explaining his view that “it’s time writing took something back from the Internet.” Pair with Cohen’s Millions interview from 2012.
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I Choose Love
Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has picked Nicole Krauss’s History of Love for the October selection of Book of the Month. You could also check out her Year in Reading in The Millions.
Baking with Nietzsche
No need to bake sugar cookies this holiday season. Try Nietzsche’s angel food cake recipe instead. “Allow the angel to reach room temperature. Then kill it,” Rebecca Coffey writes the recipe for McSweeney’s. You can find more literary cooking tips in Coffey’s Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake: And Other Recipes for the Intellectually Famished.
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We Own the Internet
Looking to be a Content Generator for a Major Internet Website? Look no further than this piece from McSweeney’s: “We pay $15 per piece of content, whether it be a well-cited, thoroughly researched 5,000-word essay or ten captions under fair-use photos, so, y’know, more bang for your buck with the photos. Also no one reads essays, so win-win.”
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Robert McCrum on books
Would you rather have a long literary career, or write a brilliant, successful one-off? Robert McCrum considers the literary career arc.
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Sendak’s Tales
Check out Maurice Sendak’s illustrations of The Brothers Grimm fairy tales posted on Brain Pickings this April. The illustrations were published with Lore Segal’s translation of the stories in The Juniper Tree: And Other Tales from Grimm. Our own Emily Colette Wilkinson revisits Sendak’s stories as an adult.
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Supporting PBS
A handy infographic explaining why PBS, in the face of a resolution in Congress to eliminate its federal funding, deserves our support.
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Really an utterly self-absorbed failure of a novel. The hype it’s riding on shows the disconnect between tight lit circles and the rest of the world; he’s a darling, but is in no way an accessible darling like Wallace, to which Cohen is sometimes compared. An NPR interview? He’s got a great publicist, I’ll grant you that.
But then I thought The Goldfinch was a fraud as well, so what do I know?