Nabokov once claimed “there is no reading, only rereading.” In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks pursues the “key to rereading,” taking The Waste Land and Mrs. Dalloway as his test cases.
Why Reread?
“Keep Arguing”
There are plenty of good reasons to read classic literature, but Mary Beard reminds us that there's a different kind of classic that's worth revisiting and questioning. "You do the ancient world much greater service if you keep arguing with them.”
Tennessee Williams’s College Days
The Strand Magazine is publishing a previously unseen Tennessee Williams short story in its spring issue. "Crazy Night" is about Williams's lovelorn college days when he describes sex like "vaccination the first day of school."
●
●
Responding to Sexual Violence
“Eventually, the judicial bureaucracy begins to seem almost as destructive as the rapist.” Domenica Ruta writes on Emily Winslow’s Jane Doe January and Joanna Connors’ I Will Find You, two books that probe our culture’s failure to address sexual violence. Pair with a piece on poetry as a response to sexual violence.
●
●
Writing the Body
For Ploughshares, Emilia Phillips writes about “the corporeality of the lyric.” As she puts it, For some, the act of writing about the body is not necessarily the inclusion of the body as a poem’s subject but the body as the vehicle for the poem. Think of how repetition recalls movement, dancing. Think of how good a rhyme feels in the mouth.”
●
●
Dangerous Novels
"The idea that novels could be dangerous seems largely have fallen by the wayside, which does raise the question of how today’s newer sources of entertainment and information will look to the critics of the future. In 50 years, maybe we’ll be lamenting our failure to read enough Internet." Anna North writes about the distant time "When Novels Were Bad For You" for The New York Times.
●
●
The Crash
“Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.” Newly minted Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro on writing The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
Boom Boom Boom
Fellow children of the ‘90s will remember how much that decade was a kind of Golden Age for disaster movies. Then as now, explosive blockbusters like Independence Day, Twister and Dante's Peak satisfied a collective appetite for wide-scale destruction and mayhem. At The Morning News, Ethan Gilsdorf considers what the genre’s evolution has to say about us.
●
●
“Smudge between the lines, fill the sexy man up.”
Mark your calendars. Thrill Murray, a Bill Murray-inspired coloring book, goes on sale this August.
●
●