At McSweeney’s, preview Michelle Tea’s Castle on the River Vistula, the final installment of her Chelsea trilogy. You could also check out our piece on contemporary YA fiction and talk therapy.
Preview Michelle Tea
The Brexit Diaries
“This inconvenient working-class revolution we are now witnessing has been accused of stupidity—I cursed it myself the day it happened—but the longer you look at it, you realize that in another sense it has the touch of genius, for it intuited the weaknesses of its enemies and effectively exploited them. The middle-class left so delights in being right! And so much of the disenfranchised working class has chosen to be fragrantly, shamelessly wrong.” Year in Reading alumna Zadie Smith shares her thoughts on Brexit.
American Literature in the 19th Century
“American literature in the 19th century speaks in the 21st in terms we have not yet abandoned – for all our technology, globalism, and panache.” (via Arts and Letters Daily)
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Iowa’s Online Advanced Fiction Seminar
This fall the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is offering a free, 7-session live online Advanced Fiction Seminar. The course will run from September 16 through October 28, and it will be taught by fiction writer Nate Brown. Best of all? It’s open to anyone with an internet connection. Applications are due September 6th.
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Doc Brown: Hippie?
Back to the Future II originally featured a very different Doc Brown from the one that made the final cut. Behold Doc’s 1967 alias, his hippie parents, and his apparent affinity for motorcycles in this 147-page script (PDF) that was later re-purposed into the movie we know today. (The Bizarro Doc action picks up around page 90.)
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“Kafka was a son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips”
“Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of [Franz] Kafka’s darker preoccupations,” writes John Banville in his investigation of the writer’s personal life and psychology.
A First for The Second Pass
The Second Pass marks its first anniversary with a bunch of writers championing their favorite out-of-print books. Happy Anniversary! (For more out-of-print recommendations see our collection of gems from last year.)
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