Did you join Emma Watson’s feminist book club? Katy Waldman did, and she has some thoughts on the Shared Shelf. We have our own feminist hate-read book club with Nicole Cliffe, Michelle Dean, Roxane Gay, and more.
Sharing the Shelf
“Let me eat it all and let me eat it now!”
“McDonald’s, I am here and I am hungry, feed me, let me eat it all and let me eat it now! Oh, what a hymn, what a hallelujah you sing to me, two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun.” Michael Murray imagines “Jack Kerouac‘s Lost Restaurant Reviews” for Hazlitt and they are absolute joys.
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Shakespeare’s Dictionary
Shakespeare invented more than 1,000 words when he was writing, and now we might be able to find out how. Two New York booksellers believe they have found Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary, John Baret’s An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie. Although scholars aren’t quite convinced, you can read the dictionary in full to decide for yourself.
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Music Writing Set to Music: Genius
Christopher R. Weingarten’s long Spin essay about Lana Del Rey, Cults, and “a multitude of mostly female-led indie heartachers” is one of the best things you’ll read this week. It’s also, as a matter of fact, one of the best multimedia integrations of Spotify I’ve seen in a while. More of this, please.
Reliable Suspense
What’s the greatest tool to create suspense? An unreliable narrator, according to Gillian Flynn, who is a master of them if you’ve read Gone Girl. She discussed how to write a good thriller, why she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasure reading, and her ambitious quest to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in chronological order in a New York Times “By the Book” interview. Pair with: Our conversation about Gone Girl.
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Poets on Poets
Editing poetry can be tricky, and the work is often misunderstood. Many of the best houses leave the work to the experts: actual poets. But is that the best route? Indeed, as this Telegraph article puts it, “a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.”
It Never Leaves You
The English major is more than just a common course of study, friends. The English major is a way of life. (via Arts and Letters Daily)
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New Lethem
Did you know Jonathan Lethem‘s a really good essayist? Thought so. Did you know he has a 450-page collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, coming out in November? Me neither. An amuse-bouche, on Norman Mailer, is up at the L.A. Review of Books.