Recommended Reading: Becca Rothfeld on courtship and gender roles in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature written at the turn of the eleventh century.
Legendary Lovers
The Literate Frontman
Some of Jeff Tweedy‘s favorite writers: “I like Henry Miller a lot. I like William H. Gass a lot. Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Kurt Vonnegut. . . . I used to walk into bookstores when I was a kid and get the stuff that looked the craziest and the most free.” (In a Rolling Stone interview, unavailable online.)
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Schmidle’s Challenge
Nicholas Schmidle‘s riveting account of Seal Team Six’s Abbottabad raid was the highlight of this week‘s New Yorker. Yet he wrote the article without interviewing any of the team members. C. Christine Fair explains how he did it.
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Where’s Ursula?
Recommended Reading: “Ursula’s Curse,” an excerpt from a forthcoming Eugene Lim novel. The piece’s protagonist seems less concerned with the end of his life (and maybe the human race) than he is with remembering an artist who tried to reach “a limit to the art market’s baseness.”
Curiosities: The Governor and the Glove
Hitchens looks back at the Rushdie fatwa and its legacy of censorship.The Feltron 2008 Annual Report“The Governor and the Glove” – an encounter with BlagojovichJoseph O’Neill remembers Updike (via TEV)Ted Leo performs Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”The Paleolithic era of online news.TNR reviews Outliers: “It is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell’s method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.“
Writing Writing
When you want to distinguish fiction and poetry writing from academic work or journalism, you use a straightforward term: creative writing. But what if that term is not the one you should use? At Slate, an article on the subject by Cydney Alexis, originally published by Inside Higher Ed.
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New Directions in The Coffin
The Coffin Factory, a “magazine for people who love books,” interviews New Directions’ Barbara Epler and Tom Roberge about “publishing and finding bold, new experiments in literature from around the world.” (via)
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Robinson, Lila and NPR
Recommended listening: Marilynne Robinson talks with NPR about about her latest novel, Lila, which we covered in our “Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview” and which Leslie Jamison recently reviewed for The Atlantic.
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