“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
Unlikely Correspondence
In a compelling personal piece for The Paris Review, Nick Antosca recounts his unlikely relationship with a “faceless confidant.”
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Clarissa Explains It All
Recommended Reading: This piece by Adelle Waldman at The New Yorker on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson, “the man who made the modern novel.”
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Comedy Central Books
Comedy Central will team up with Running Press to launch a joint publishing venture called Comedy Central Books. Their first title will be a “holiday themed novelty book” by Denis Leary. Fun Fact: Leary is Conan O’Brien’s third cousin.
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Monday Links
Friend of The Millions Edan Lepucki has a short story in the most recent LA Times West Magazine, “Salt Lick“. Congrats!I’ve heard of publishers throwing in a free bookmark to help sell copies of a new book, but gold?Oriani Fallaci, the fiery (and athiest) Italian journalist who recently passed away, bequethed her library to a Pontifical university.Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam takes the Sony Reader for a spin and isn’t impressed.Did you know that among this year’s finalists is the first graphic novel ever to be in the running for a National Book Award? Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese has been given that honor. “I can’t say it’s a dream come true, because it never even would have occurred to me to dream it. It wasn’t in my reality,” Yang says.John Hodgman is at it again with one of the more antic Washington Post chats I’ve ever encountered. (via Books are my only friends)
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1,000 on Twitter
Cheers to @Selorian for becoming the 1,000th follower of @The_Millions on Twitter.
And Still I Rise
Via Galleycat we’re watching the just-released trailer for the upcoming documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, which is scheduled to air on October 14th on PBS. Pair with this beautiful in memoriam we published upon her passing in 2014.
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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.