Recommended Reading: Over at Harper’s, Anne Carson describes what happens when a zombie meets a snake, in her first published short story.
A Zombie Meets a Snake
New Rooms
Roald Dahl’s estate has released a 1961 draft chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The draft reveals a number of little-known characters the author later excised from the book. It also reveals that, at one point, the story featured as many as 10 golden tickets. The Guardian has the draft chapter in full.
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“A big furry fish in a tiny barrel”
As a young girl in the 1980s, Melissa Carroll played with My Little Pony dolls, in part because, as she puts it, “I knew I’d better have one.” Nearly thirty years on, she’s fascinated by the new surge of interest in the dolls, especially the interest displayed by the men who call themselves Bronies. At The Rumpus, her Sunday essay on the rise of the Brony and gender dynamics in America.
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The Nobel Isn’t Everything
Wole Soyinka does not approve of the push for Chinua Achebe to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize for Literature, and he doesn’t appreciate fan letters asking for his support to that end. “How did creative valuation descend to such banality?” Soyinka remarks in an interview with SaharaReporters. “Do these people know what they’re doing – they are inscribing Chinua’s epitaph in the negative mode of thwarted expectations. I find that disgusting.”
The Restaurant Model of Medicine
“Doctors may be tempted to give patients what we want, even when it is not good for us.” Guernica has an excerpt from Eula Biss’s forthcoming On Immunity: An Innoculation, which we featured in our book preview.
Summer Poems
Clear your schedule for today, if you have one. The Poetry Foundation rounded up a whole heap of “Summer Poems” intended to “make you one with the sun.”
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All Things Interwoven
“Imagination for me has always been about the spaces in between, a sort of filler that completes a picture. If what we know is the jaggedness of the ocean floor, then imagination is the body of water that defines what is hidden and what is seen.” This essay on interstices and representing Hawai’i Creole English as a legitimate literary participant is excellent.
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