Recommended Viewing: A complete collection of Wes Anderson video essays. If it’s Anderson you’re after, here’s a piece of short fiction he wrote during his time in college.
A Filmmaker’s Compendium
Tuesday New Release Day
Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow is out today (Kakutani sez, “remarkably tedious” but The Guardian adds, “Amis might draw comfort from the long and distinguished list of Kakutani’s literary victims.”) Also out, Sebastian Junger’s War, the result of time spent embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan.
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Novel Projects
“Well, is ‘addiction’ what a literary writer should want in readers? And if a writer accepts such addiction, or even rejoices in it, as Murakami seems to, doesn’t it put pressure on him, as pusher, to offer more of the same?” Tim Parks writes for the NYRB about writers who keep producing more of the same to please hungry readers.
“The Game” and Fan Fiction
Electric Literature has published a look at two new Sherlock Holmes fan fictions, “the game,” and various copyright complications, which just happens to dovetail with our own Elizabeth Minkel‘s Year in Reading account of admitting to loving Sherlock fan fic. In fact, loving the great detective has a lot to do with writing well: as Ryan Britt puts it, successful fan fiction authors “all love Holmes and his adventures way more than the man who created the great detective thought possible. Which, today, remains the biggest cultural mystery we’ll hopefully never get tired of investigating.”
The Pathways of an Essay
Recommended Reading: E.V. de Cleyre writes for Ploughshares about the essay form and its familiar shapes.
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