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.
IRL
Colson Whitehead’s Two Types of Books
“There’s only two kinds of books, shit you like, and shit you don’t like," Colson Whitehead told the crowd in his lively AWP Keynote.
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Burning Yearning Being Burning Yearning
“To be awake was a thing many had dreamed of, while continuing to sleep for years, like the famous princess in her coffin of glass. Once I opened a Chinese fortune cookie that said, Some will attain their heart’s desire, alas.” Revisiting this fantastic Anne Carson poem, “The Day Antonioni Came to the Asylum (Rhapsody),” over at The Paris Review. Carson’s newest, Float, is due out in a couple of months.
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Paper or Plastic?
Paper or plastic? Hey, you with the Kindle! Stop looking so smug… E-books aren’t as green as you think.
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Cocktail Hour
“0.5 hrs: Read this week’s New Yorker fiction. 0.7 hrs: Hated on New Yorker writer with her derivative characters & mise-en-scenes. 0.1 hrs: Looked up ‘mise-en-scene’ on Wikipedia. 1.3 hrs: Phone call with writer friend; discussed how much New Yorker fiction sucks. 0.5 hrs: Drafted & emailed query letter to New Yorker (for super postmodern story).” The good people at McSweeney’s imagine an impossibly tedious world where writers and poets bill by the hour.
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Audiobook Reviews by Kyle Minor
Cool Move Alert: Kyle Minor is reviewing audiobooks for Salon. His first piece is on Dave Eggers’ Hologram for the King, as read by Dion Graham (The Wire, Law and Order).
We Have the Technology
At The Awl, James S. Murphy goes in-depth on the Stony Brook study, which I wrote about last week, that identified characteristics of historically successful books. In making a point about the publishing industry, he references the sale of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel.
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Porn Studies
A new academic journal dedicated to critical explorations of “cultural products and services designated as pornographic” will debut next spring. “Porn Studies is a direct outgrowth of the mounting scholarly interest in the topic of pornography as a significant, yet relatively under-examined, realm of popular culture,” writes Lynn Comella.
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?