New from George Saunders
Mad Men Make Love
With the season five premiere of Mad Men fast approaching, now’s as good a time as any to catch up on the intimate commingling of its main characters. Fortunately, the folks at Wired have organized the whole thing into a neat “Illustrated Guide to Mad Men Bed-Hopping.”
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The Poetic Meter of a Viral Tweet
Frankie Thomas dissects why her viral tweet, an ode to Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Cohen, and Shakespeare, seemed to speak to our need for poetic meter.
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They Really Get Me
For an invigorating jolt of proletarian/genetic bitterness, The New York Times has a “New Victorian” fashion slide show, featuring a selection of gentlemen with admirable bone structure, all in thousand-dollar cutaway coats and plaids and things.
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Know The Rules Before You Break Them
Point: Dan Chaon believes younger writers should read more contemporary writing before attempting to be published themselves. Counterpoint: J. Robert Lennon believes most contemporary writing is a waste of would-be writers’ precious time. TL;DR Version: Nathan Elwood notes that if writers “want to change the face of literary fiction … [they should] at least know what it looks like.”
Hemingway Double Shot
Got a couple thousand bucks lying around? You can place a bid on one of Ernest Hemingway’s love letters. Or, for a more modest price of “free,” you can read Tim Weed’s rumination entitled “Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in Havana.”
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Writers on Politics
For 3:AM Magazine, English writer Joanna Walsh gathered other writers’ thoughts on Brexit. “Brexit is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said Ali Smith.