Sinclair Lewis tried to warn us and we didn’t listen–it can always happen here. Over at The Literary Hub, this piece takes a look at Lewis’s 1935 political novel It Can’t Happen Here as a mirror for Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to political superstardom.
We Asked For It
Goodbye, Britannica
After nearly a quarter of a millennium, the Encyclopedia Britannica is ending its print run. While the publication plans to move to a digital subscription based model, and to continue to gather information about the known world, many are sad to note its passing. Roxane Gay offers a particularly heartfelt eulogy: ” it was exciting to open the huge box and pull out the leather bound volumes, so many of them, the pages lined in gold.”
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Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
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Fifty Shades of Regret
“Shouldn’t we all feel a little embarrassed about the fuss we made over 50 Shades of Grey?” Jessa Crispin writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about E.L. James’ trilogy and some of the longer responses, including Hard-Core Romance, which we briefly covered a few months ago.
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Best Book Covers of 2009
Amazon has 60 books in 10 categories up for a vote for “Best Book Covers of 2009.” There’s plenty of literary eye candy in the mix.
Spoiling Infinite Jest
There are three kinds of readers of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: those who feel some niggling guilt about that brick on their bookshelf, those who’ve read it (proudly) but secretly may have no idea what happened in that tangled ending, and the people responsible for this excellent infographic. (Complement with cached commentary at Infinite Summer and a guide to the geography of Wallace’s Boston.)
Iraqi Speculative Fiction Comes to the US
“It comprises 10 short stories written by Iraqis, all of whom were guided by a simple yet fertile premise: What might Iraq look like a century from now?” The Atlantic review’s Tor’s anthology Iraq + 100 (originally published last year by Comma Press in England), which was released stateside last month—in an attempt to bring visibility to an underrepresented group of writers in America. Read The Millions’ review of the “ambitious short story collection” from March.
How disappointing to find on The Millions. Please tell me you’re not another party line Democrat / liberal publication too!
Well, The Donald hardly seems Republican, Democratic or even Independent. He sounds to my humble ears like a 2 bit populist demagogue riding the tsunami of fear and xenophobia currently gripping the country in an ideological half-nelson. And we know these guys are never really “liberal” or “conservative”, regardless of their stated affiliations. Sorry to go political — Iowa, it’s all in your hands!