Marlon James, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize, believes that writers of color are “pandering to the white woman.” James touched on some related topics in the conversation with novelist Jeanette Winterson that we told you about yesterday.
Private Ennui
The Cultural Logic of Margaret Atwood
Fredric Jameson reviews Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood for the London Review of Books.
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“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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Failsafe
In 1979, William Gaddis taught a course at Bard College on “The Literature of Failure,” examining works that somehow focused on personal failure or insufficiency. These included, among other books, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, as well as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. In Bookforum, Casey Michael Henry takes on a related genre: the literature of obsolescence. You could also read James Cappio on meeting Gaddis in person.
Listening: Between the Covers
Recommended Listening: Looking for interviews with authors previously featured on The Millions? Check out David Naimon‘s Between the Covers podcast, which features the likes of Chang-rae Lee, Kyle Minor, Lorrie Moore, Helen Oyeyemi and Gina Frangello.
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The Spivet App
Always pushing the envelope in terms of how we think about books, Reif Larsen has just announced an iPad app for his novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. As the demo video suggests, this something with much more depth and interaction than just a simple port from print to digital.
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Obscene and Digitized at Last
Need a giggle? You can now access the British Library’s collection of obscene writing online, which have previously been locked up for over a century. The newly digitized collection includes the works of the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Stretzer, and more.
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I Love Candy
“I wanted to tell him: Shut up! You’re ruining my high. People fall in love every single day.” A delightful little Dentist Poem by Daisy Friedman from the archives of The Paris Review.
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