Has there ever been a decent television show about book publishing? Not yet. Liam O’Brien at Melville House explains how Showtime’s The Affair is the best one we’ve got–and by “best,” he means impossible and hilariously unrealistic.
A Sordid Affair
Civilization of the Spectacle
“If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it’s a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it’s worrying.” Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky interviews the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa about the contemporary collapse between “high” and “low” cultures.
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On the Most External of Hard Drives
Scared of relying on the cloud? Worried your book-in-progress might disappear into cyberspace? How would you feel if you could save your files on — wait for it — the Moon?
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What Is It Good For?
“War isn’t a destination, nor is it a topic to be mined for scribes with nothing else to say … War can be a subject, like any other, and it can be written about well, and it can be written about poorly.” Here is Matt Gallagher, author of the Iraq-war novel Youngblood, in an interview with J.T. Price at Bomb. Last week, Gallagher interviewed another great young novelist/veteran (and winner of the 2014 National Book Award in fiction), Phil Klay.
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Susan Choi on Her Quarantine Reading Schedule
Susan Choi on the writer's responsibility to read and how the quarantine has given her more time to read.
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I Want My MTV
For those among us who have missed the eighties, from now until November 8th, Esquire magazine is hosting a special pop-up edition of SPY, that late-millennial stalwart of satirical journalism. Co-founder (and novelist) Kurt Andersen said he was moved to bring the magazine back because “lots more people, pretty much every day, said to me, ‘SPY really needs to be rebooted, if only just for the election.'”
If it’s election satire you want, we highly recommend our own Jacob Lambert‘s literary cagematch: Hemingway vs. Faulkner vs. Trump.
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