Louis Menand, Thessaly La Force, Amelia Lester, and David Haglund have come together to discuss the influence of literary powerhouse and cultural icon Joan Didion in The New Yorker’s Out Loud Podcast. Our own Michael Bourne calls Didion America’s Truth Teller in his review of her biography.
Icon and Author
Migraine Memories
Writer and illustrator Allyson Hoffman reflects on how chronic illness impacts daily life and memory.
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Quantum Invisibility Cloaks: For When Ordinary Invisibility Cloaks Won’t Cut It
This might come in handy if you’re trying to escape a bad review, or even avoid hanging out with your family. A team of physicists has developed a theory for “how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.” Take that, Harry Potter.
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You are Muriel Spark
“The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet.” If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton’s article at The Toast. We aren’t surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.
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The Poetic Meter of a Viral Tweet
Frankie Thomas dissects why her viral tweet, an ode to Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Cohen, and Shakespeare, seemed to speak to our need for poetic meter.
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Summer Reading, happened so fast.
Now that it’s officially summer, you might find yourself thinking about all of the books you might like to read in the sun. New Directions has a great list (summer of Lispector!), and of course there’s the LARB‘s #OccupyGaddis summer book club.
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