“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” Barrett Brown reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Purity from prison. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book.
Purity from Prison
“Depressing day”
A while back, I linked to a contentious letter between Saul Bellow and Jack Ludwig, written not long after Bellow found out Ludwig was sleeping with his wife. Now, here’s a (somewhat) less angry piece of correspondence, sent from Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym. Sample quote: “Has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always unhappy?”
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The Other Fitzgerald’s Fiction
Recommended Reading: Zelda Fitzgerald’s short story “The Iceberg,” which she won a prize for as a teenager. Pair with: Our review of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald.
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The Illusion of Confidence
Over-confident people enter into our lives in many forms: military planners, Wall Street investors, that chick shouting *NSYNC into the mic at the back of the bar. Daniel Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, deals with this phenomenon of human nature. Read an excerpt here.
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Are Books Clutter?
When Marie Kondo's Netflix show came out, Hannah McGregor writes for Electric Literature, "the Internet suddenly had a lot of opinions about clutter."
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Langewiesche on the Chilean Miners
The Outlaw Sea author William Langewiesche has a new ebook out in the “Single” format, Finding the Devil: Darkness, Light, and the Untold Story of the Chilean Mine Disaster, about the 2010 disaster that left 33 miners trapped for nearly two months.
Metoosexuals
At The Daily Beast, Lizzie Skurnick writes about hip fatherhood, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon.
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“King of the Honkies” is such a good title I may have to steal it. And that’s exactly what Franzen is, isn’t he? What he always wanted to be, anyway.
Oh, wow, another jealous nobody virtue-signaling his contempt for Franzen and his audience, how brave and iconoclastic. Casual racism, too! Of all the thousands of identical pieces you can find like this around the web, this is easily my favorite.
Thanks for this link. The review made me laugh out loud.