Over at The New Inquiry, Alison Kinney writes on narrative opportunity, the true function of the literary orphan, and the rage of the real orphan. This moving piece by Matthew Salesses for The Millions on adoption and searching for oneself in a strange place is a nice complement.
The Literary Orphan
The Wind-Up You Chroncile
Do you love old jazz? Are you nostalgic? Did your wife mysteriously disappear? Then you might be in a Haruki Murakami novel. At The Toast, Alice Lee gives criteria to determine whether you’re part of Murakami’s fictional universe.
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FictionDaily
FictionDaily tales a page from Arts and Letters Daily and posts links to pieces of fiction found online in three different categories (long, short, and genre) every day.
Unearthing the Curtain
When you think of Shakespeare’s plays, you probably think of the Globe Theatre. Yet for more than twenty years before the Globe was opened, the Curtain Theatre was the first home to such plays as Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. Unfortunately the place was closed and disassembled in the 17th century, and the location was presumed lost. Fast forward 400 years, however, and a team of East London excavators have finally uncovered a few of its sections.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace, O’Rourke, Levy
It seems almost silly to mention it since the book’s been on shelves and discussed in the book pages for a couple of weeks now, but the “official” release date of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is this Friday. (Our review was published today.) Meghan O’Rourke’s grief memoir The Long Goodbye is out this week. And another look at our culture through the lens of our technology is now out, Steven Levy’s In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.
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The “Bad” Author Myth
On the heels of a New Mexico school district banning Neverwhere because a mother considered it “R-rated,” Neil Gaiman delivered a lecture for the Reading Agency about the importance of libraries and reading for children. “It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different,” he said about banning books.
Tip of the Tongue
After moving to Brooklyn, Sabine Heinlein spent a year trying to learn English, a task which left the native German speaker “close to aphasic” after a few months. Eventually, she met up with another recent immigrant, who enlisted her for help in a sprawling art project: a collection of words from each language spoken in New York City. At The Hairpin, she writes about her experience.