Recommended Reading: Alice Walker and Colm Tóibín discuss adaptations of their work for film and stage. Pair with our article on breaking down the Oscar for adapted screenplay.
On Adaptation
Paying Hommage
There’s a new literary magazine on the digital shelves. The Neu Jorker is “an hommage d'triomphe” to a magazine with an eerily similar name.
Coming Soon: The Future
Lapham's Quarterly's Food issue was a big hit, but their upcoming Future issue looks promising as well.
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The Rooster Culminates
If you haven't been following The Morning News Tournament of Books, now is the time to catch up. There's been ample drama and the always insightful commentary from the booth. The finalists are set - Wolf Hall and The Lacuna - and the champion will be revealed on Monday.
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How To: Write Difference
"Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes?" Roxane Gay reviews Joyce Carol Oates's The Sacrifice and simultaneously explains how to write difference well. Hint: it "demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent."
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Could the internet save book reviews?
Sarah Fay, associate editor of The Paris Review, has a piece in The Atlantic on the digitization of book reviewing, framed beautifully by references to George Orwell's 1946 essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer." She praises Bookslut, Nancy Pearl, Goodreads, and The Los Angeles Review of Books for their collective skills of recommendation, reviewing, and New Criticism. I'd add The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus, The New Inquiry, The Morning News (for their annual Tournament of Books feature), and of course, The Millions.
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Brow Raised
Not highbrow, not lowbrow, not even middlebrow - is American culture now dominated by the upper middle brow?
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Tragicomic
Recommended Reading: Helen Vendler on John Berryman. You could also read Stephen Akey on Berryman's collection The Dream Songs.