“War isn’t a destination, nor is it a topic to be mined for scribes with nothing else to say … War can be a subject, like any other, and it can be written about well, and it can be written about poorly.” Here is Matt Gallagher, author of the Iraq-war novel Youngblood, in an interview with J.T. Price at Bomb. Last week, Gallagher interviewed another great young novelist/veteran (and winner of the 2014 National Book Award in fiction), Phil Klay.
What Is It Good For?
What Should I Title This?
Titles are hard, guys. Over at The Daily Beast, Ruth Bernard Yeazell tries to figure out why so often famous paintings have titles that don’t seem to match up with the work at all. Here are four (4) other pieces on titles — I told you, titles are hard.
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Zora Neale Hurston, Girl Detective
“Where is the black version of Caddie Woodlawn (a 19th-century Wisconsin tomboy) or Harriet the Spy (a 20th-century Upper East Sider), smart, spunky, fictional heroines for the tween crowd?” Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon fictionalize beloved Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston as a girl detective in Zora and Me.
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Canonical Comics
The world’s great literature as comics and visuals. Though, as Steven Heller points out in The Atlantic, defining the canon is a contentious task, comics or no.
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It’s Tuesday. It’s New Releases.
Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has a new book out in the U.S. today: The Museum of Innocence. Also new on American shelves is the Booker Prize shortlister by Simon Mawer: The Glass Room.
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Boy Meets World, Boy Meets Girl
In a perfect mix of high and low art, Samuel L. Jackson performed a slam poem about Boy Meets World on The Tonight Show. “Daughter of hippies/Name of a gypsy/’Topanga,’ Corey cries.”
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Hayao Miyazaki Retires
Renowned filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki recently announced his retirement, and noted that his forthcoming film The Wind Rises will be his last. In honor of his storytelling legacy, TheLittlePrince.com dug up an old list of the animator’s 50 favorite books.
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Get out of the restaurant
Though excellent fiction has been staged in restaurants (Richard Russo’s Empire Falls comes to mind, as well as YA novel Hope was Here), I have to admit Rebecca Makkai at Ploughshares has a point that dining-in-public scenes are getting a bit old. “All the unfolding of napkins and poking at the French fries… it’s filler.”
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