What if the Tour de France nearly ground to a halt due to fiction? Imagine the best bikers in the world reading themselves into injury. At The Morning News, our own Matt Seidel imagines the chaos, making clear what happens when professional athletes meet page-turners. You could also read Matt’s essay on Tim Krabbé’s book The Rider.
Zen and the Art of Failing at the Tour de France
Arthur Phillips, Still Writing
This thoroughly entertaining conversation between Robert Birnbaum and Arthur Phillips is not to be missed. Topics include faking Shakespeare, beagles, being anti-social in Brooklyn, pilates, and writing for a living.
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Origin Story
Over at JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton writes on historical interpretations of the Book of Genesis and literal readings of a text that had been interpreted as allegory for centuries.
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Great Genes
“My mum is Jerry Hall and my father’s Mick Jagger. People say I have great genes,” says the youngest of Mick Jagger’s children, Georgia May Jagger, in a new Hudson Jeans television ad. See the jeans and genes of this “neo-Bardot” at The Daily Beast.
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Across the Screen
“His books are not only obviously produced by an obsessive film buff (as evidenced by one wry recurring trick, the dates in brackets that follow even citations of celluloid ephemera), they often seem to want to be movies, as shown by another signature device, the way his protagonists – from the 1890s European spies and 1950s New Yorkers in the interwoven narratives of his debut, V. in 1963, all the way to Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge in 2013 – break anti-naturalistically into song like characters in musicals.” An argument that Thomas Pynchon writes fiction tailor-made for the cinema.
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There Is No Real Life
If you enjoyed Bill Morris’s review of The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest collection of essays, then you’ll really like this interview with Hemon over at Guernica.
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