When you think “Franz Kafka,” it typically isn’t his sunny disposition that comes to mind. According to Reiner Stach, this new collection of ephemera, however, seeks to challenge the tired, old conception of Kafka-as-tortured neurotic. Here’s a Millions review of Stach’s twin biographies of Kafka, himself.
Kafka Who?
The Truth Hurts
Good news! According to Vinson Cunningham’s new essay in The New Yorker, beauty merely “masks and perfumes … it freezes moral categories in place,” whereas ugliness, on the other hand, “is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” Wait, is that good news? Bonus: Vinson wrote a Year in Reading piece for us.
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“How like a prison is my cubicle…”
In May, poet David Lehman wrote the first line of a sonnet about cubicle anomie and began crowdsourcing the rest. The completed 12-week project at The American Scholar is not merely a pretty great piece on its own, but a lesson in how to write one, line by line: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8/9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. You can submit your title suggestion as late as midnight on Sunday, but we suggest getting a start on it now, while the prison of work is still fresh in mind. (h/t The New York Times)
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The New Republic’s New Reader
The New Republic, which was recently acquired by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, has started a super clean, neat little news reader.
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Mrs. Dalloway’s Privacy
Joshua Rothman writes for The New Yorker about Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, privacy and “a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open.”
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Summer Reading, happened so fast.
Now that it’s officially summer, you might find yourself thinking about all of the books you might like to read in the sun. New Directions has a great list (summer of Lispector!), and of course there’s the LARB‘s #OccupyGaddis summer book club.
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Burying the Hatchet
“The Hatchet Job Award appeals, in its depressingly calculated way, to the basest and most self-serving of journalistic instincts, and seems to arise out of, and perpetuate, a misunderstanding of what criticism actually is.” At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell criticizes the award for promoting the same bad criticism it claims to detest.
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