The “Millennials are ruining everything” think piece has become a bit of a trope at this point, so it’s refreshing when you find one that says something new. This piece on the serious danger of losing serious readers to their cellphone screens is well worth the read.
There Will Be Time
Thursday Story: Chris Womersley
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Child of Franco
Warning: There’s another James Franco film coming your way. His latest literary adaptation is of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. The first trailer features banjo, an ominous voiceover, an edgy Scott Haze, and surprisingly little Franco.
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Write / Right / Night / Owl
Kathryn Schulz’s meditation on insomnia, on staying up late and writing deep into the night.
The Iron Man
Sasha Dugdale believes that Ted Hughes’s greatest contribution to the world of poetry remains Modern Poetry in Translation, the magazine which got its start thanks to an off-hand suggestion by Hughes at a cocktail party in the mid-sixties. Here’s our review of Jonathan Bate’s recent take on the poet, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Levertov; Tolstoy; Freud
New this week: The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov; a new translation of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; and the complete letters of Sigmund Freud.
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is “the two-person collaboration… the essential creative act”? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he’s written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced – C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even “works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet.” Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
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