Atwood and Yeats Together
Custodian of Forgotten Books
Recommended Reading: On Brad Bigelow, a “Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Our own Claire Cameron traces the history of John Williams’s Stoner, which was first published in 1965 and became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013.
“Tongue-in-Cheek Tocqueville”
“‘So your idea is to drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American?’ ‘Yes.'” Karl Ove Knausgaard travels North America as “a tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville” for the New York Times Magazine. Pair with his piece for The Millions, “The View from My Window is a Constant Reminder,” and with Jonathan Callahan‘s reading of Knausgaard’s My Struggle.
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Trololololol
“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened.” Talking Points Memo reports that Simon & Schuster is moving forward with plans to publish a book by Breitbart News editor and white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos, whose extended harassment of comedian Leslie Jones finally led to his expulsion from Twitter last year. Critics of the publishing house have called for its boycott, including some of its own authors.
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Didion: Cool and Manly?
The Atlantic reviews the first full-length biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty, to be released August 25th. The biography “looks at the author’s legacy of cool.” Related: Franklin Strong’s essay on “The Manliness of Joan Didion” in The Millions.
“He proposes that assholism is more rampant in society than ever before.”
Is this image of John McEnroe a great visual complement to John McWhorter’s review of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, or is it the greatest visual complement to John McWhorter’s review of Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years?
Beach Reads
From Ian McEwan to Iris Murdoch, The Guardian offers a list of the 10 best seaside novels. Pair with our own Mark O’Connell‘s account of a close encounter with John Banville, whose The Sea makes the #8 spot.
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Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)