“What made The Great Gatsby so great? Does everyone think he’s that great? Why?” Just in time for the back-to-school rush: essay questions from a teacher who didn’t finish any of the required reading (a.k.a. McSweeney’s).
(Un)Required Reading
Six Impossible Things
Recommended Viewing: Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.
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Birnbaum and Giraldi
Robert Birnbaum talks to William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters, about Val Kilmer, Diana Ross, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other topics.
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What to Believe In
Recommended Reading: Rene Denfeld and Stephanie Feldman on the line between realism and fantasy in their debut novels.
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Take Three
You may have read our review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant. You may also have read our own Mark O’Connell’s review at Slate. For another opinion, you could read James Wood, who writes about Ishiguro’s “prose of provoking equilibrium” in the latest New Yorker.
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Archiving the Internet
“Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time.” Jenna Wortham writes on how archiving the Internet would change history. We’ve written about the implications of the Internet more than once.
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