Recommended (Frustrating) Reading: “Men Explain Submissions To Me,” an eye-opening new piece from Sarah Blake at The Rumpus.
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Mad, Bad, and Healthy to Know
"It was spring. Byron was leaving England forever, a cloud of infamy hanging over him. (He is one of the few people you can write something like that about and have it be true; that is part of why he's so satisfying.)" Via The Awl: the adventures of John Polidori, literary vampire and doctor to Lord Byron.
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Train Dreams
Wes Anderson really likes trains, and not just any trains -- the director of The Grand Budapest Hotel is a big fan of riding on Amtrak. “It's one thing to be stuck together for the long haul to New Zealand in the upper deck of a 747 for 16 hours," he told a writer for the company’ s blog, "but it's an altogether different matter to hit the dining car three meals a day for two and a half days running onboard the Southwest Chief." This may be a good time to read our own Nick Ripatrazone's essay on writers and trains.
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Old Last Words
Last Friday was T.S. Eliot’s birthday, and to mark the occasion, Sadie Stein looked back on his 1965 Times obituary. As it turns out, it uses a phrase -- now obscure -- that was popularized by Nancy Mitford in the anthology Noblesse Oblige.
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And “Crude”
Over at The Atlantic Wire, Jen Doll catalogues the many words first coined by Geoffrey Chaucer, which includes such everyday staples as "dotard," "fattish," "caterwaul" and "twitter."
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Semiotics and Jeffrey Eugenides
The semiotics-department backdrop to Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel, The Marriage Plot, seems to have sparked a new mode of confessional writing. But Theorists are so seductive because they are, themselves, essentially literary.
A 20 Year Overnight Success
Joe Fassler interviews recent MacArthur Genius and Year-in-Reading alum Viet Thanh Nguyen on the myth of overnight success, balancing an academic career while still finding time to write novels and the sacrifices all writers must make. Over at Electric Literature.
Two-fer from Kiš
Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, recently profiled by Sam Sacks, has two short pieces up on the Bomb! website.
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Behind the Shower Curtain
"Psycho glories in narrative fractures and perverse behavior; it subverts the expectations of an audience already habituated to Hitchcockian suspense by pushing even further, masterfully administering a dose of sheer shock. Hitchcock, on the other hand, struggles to arouse even suspense." How to watch a film about the master of film.
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someone please mansplain to me how in the world the email exchange in this article is sexist. good grief.