Jefferson on Construction
Family Matters
Piggybacking off a brief aside in Ian Frazier’s new review of James Agee’s Cotton Tenants, Claire Kelley explores an odd and intriguing question: was Agee related to Walt Whitman? (Related: Mallory Ortberg on the probability that Whitman did the dirty with Oscar Wilde.)
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Act 266, Scene 6
How do you turn a 900-page novel into a play? You make it five hours long, that’s how. Roberto Bolaño’s classic 2666 is headed for the stage.
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Dispatch from Planet Earth
Excerpts from Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission are now available online in Ninth Letter. Morena combines flash fiction and prose poetry in his record of the phonograph record that was included on the Voyager spacecrafts. The record plated with gold contained 27 songs, 118 images, and greetings in 55 languages, and was meant to summarize all life on Earth for the extraterrestrials.
Dear Jack
Saul Bellow met Jack Ludwig at Bard College in the fifties. The two became friends, and founded a magazine together, called The Noble Savage. Then, not long after the magazine began running, Ludwig started an affair with Bellow’s wife. Here’s the letter Bellow sent him when he found out. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel on Bellow’s novel The Bellarosa Connection.
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Submit to ‘It’s Lit’
“Good evening.”
While you wait around for Hitchcock to hit theaters, you’ve got plenty of time to check out this online record of thirteen storyboards from the English director’s classic films.
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