If you’ve read the Inferno, you’ve journeyed with Dante and Virgil to the ninth circle of Hell. At McSweeney’s, you can go grocery shopping with them. “Abandon all carts, ye who enter here.”
Abandon All Carts
Alzheimer’s & Literature
"It’s a critical dilemma in my reading and writing but also a real-life dilemma in a family like mine, with Alzheimer’s in our genes: How do you locate the personhood in someone who is, for neurobiological reasons, no longer the person you knew? Is there a way to be true to medical fact and still find something that is transcendently human?" Stefan Merrill Block writes about the literature of Alzheimer's and Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves, which Lisa Peet reviewed for The Millions.
Neurocriticism
At N+1, Marco Roth autopsies "the neuronovel" - think Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette's), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia), The Echo Maker (Capgras syndrome), and Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras again?) - and finds "sign[s] of the novel's diminishing purview."
On the Brilliance of Chris Ware
The folks at the outstanding Chicago-based journal The Point offer, as a teaser for their fourth issue, a lengthy consideration of the cartoonist Chris Ware.
Riverhead Heads
Riverhead Books makes an amusing pun in a new fundraiser in which individuals can purchase 3D heads of Riverhead authors — Marlon James, Khaled Hosseini, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lauren Groff, Nick Hornby and more. Proceeds will go to the nonprofit Libraries Without Borders, which supports migrant and refugee populations in Europe by making books and learning materials accessible in multiple languages.