Believe it or not, Fifty Shades of Grey was still the bestselling book of 2015. For a fascinating, in-depth look at what sold and what didn’t, head over to The Guardian. The disconnect between the retail top ten and the myriad year-end lists alone is worth the look.
Fifty Shades Again
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Houellebecq Wins France’s Top Literary Award
Controversial writer Michel Houellebecq finally wins France’s top literary award, the Goncourt Prize, for The Map and the Territory (published in French last September).
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“I’m thousands of miles away, and you can’t get to me”
The Yale Literary Magazine caught up with the reclusive author Denis Johnson to discuss the poets who made him want to write poetry, his favorite mass cultural product, and the chief reason he avoids giving interviews.
Negative Theology
Anthony Domestico writes on negative theology in the works of Joy Williams and Mary Rakow at Commonweal Magazine. Our own Nick Ripatrazone offers 50 reasons why you should read Joy Williams.
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Semicolon Shenanigans
Need to spice up your writing? Try one of McSweeney’s punctuation marks such as the Yellow-Winged Apostrophe, which likes “to ‘peace out’ of its obligation to indicate possession or contraction,” or the Academic Ellipsis, which “is used by those who wish to demonstrate just how much more they know about how to use ellipses than you do.”
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Weary Old Men
In an excerpt of Out of Time, a new book on “the pleasures and perils of ageing,” author Lynne Segal makes a case that many iconic male writers — among them Philip Roth, John Updike and Martin Amis — display in their works a belief that the slow loss of virility is one of the most tragic effects of growing older for men. Citing passages from Toward the End of Time and Portnoy’s Complaint, she finds evidence that these writers’ depictions of masculinity reveal “obdurate social hierarchies of gender and ageing.” (Related: Keith Meatto on advice you can glean from Philip Roth’s work.)
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