Recommended Reading: Can desire thrive without freedom? On the works of Margaret Atwood and Michel Houellebecq in The Atlantic. Our essay on Atwood’s vision of the future and review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism pair nicely.
Desire and Freedom
Audible Writers
Apropos of my literary YouTube posts, our own Mark O’Connell riffs on the speaking voice of several authors.
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As Bad As The Worst
Believe it or not, there may be a connection between Walt Whitman and US drones.
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Space Invaders in The Smithsonian
Martin Amis isn’t the only highbrow fan of video games. As of last Friday, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington has begun “The Art of Videogames,” which is “one of the first major shows to explore the artistic power of the medium.”
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Best of Full Stop
Sure, you could look ahead to the happenings of 2012, but that’s only half as fun as recapping Full Stop‘s 2011 “Best of the Blog” archives. (Part 2 here)
Two books for $22 at Open Letter
To celebrate their thirteen-month anniversary, Open Letter Books is having a sale. Buy any two books from their catalog for $22, and you are also entered to win a free subscription for a full year of their titles. Don’t know where to start? Their books include Vilnius Poker, touted as the preeminent Lithuanian novel of the past twenty years, as well as Dubravka Ugresic’s formidable collection of essays, Nobody’s Home.
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The Morning News Tournament of Books
Emma Straub declares Julian Barnes‘s Sense of an Ending fitter than Donald Ray Pollock‘s The Devil All the Time in the opening round of The Morning News Tournament of Books.
A Refuge for Reinventing the Real
“In my adolescence people spoke of ‘café intellectuals,’ not with the respect due to a sect that transmits ideas within the cramped space of a table but with the contempt reserved for those who turn their backs on reality and take refuge in vain speculation.” Juan Villoro on the writing life in Mexico City’s cafés as part of the “Writing Life Around the World” series for Electric Literature.