“The last line of Saul Bellow’s ‘A Single Dish’ is nothing like poetry. I can’t tell you what any single one of those words means. Imagine you’re a lexicographer and you have to define the word that, or how. And on top of this, there’s none of Bellow’s typical play with rhythm and language—it’s almost a non-sentence. And yet, when I get to it in the story, I weep.” Ethan Canin at The Atlantic on how Saul Bellow packs so much emotion into a single sentence. Here are a couple Bellow-related Millions links for your perusing pleasure.
That Was How He Was
Vote for The Millions at 3 Quarks Daily
Hey look, several pieces of ours are in the running to win 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prizes! On their voting page, you can cast your ballot for James McWilliams’s piece on Faulkner, our own Hannah Gersen’s appreciation of Friday Night Lights, or our own Nick Ripatrazone’s essay on teaching English, among other nominees.
Weird Science
“I do remember thinking ‘You can’t get involved in the particle physics of fantasy.’ You can take it down to a certain level but if you get too involved in the particle physics then it’s not [useful] to continue. So I guess we have a branch of science that even its practitioners do not understand, that they may as well call magic.” Talking with David Mitchell.
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The Literary Identity
“Being someone who’s an outsider, there are so many ways in which the world acts on you or assigns narratives to you.” Literary Hub interviews author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi about literature, identity, and her new novel, Call Me Zebra. From our archives: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim‘s review of Call Me Zebra.
Fractal Surfaces
Recommended Reading: On Marianne Moore’s infectious devotion to all things small, and how that same devotion helped make her Observations one of the great verbal works of art of the 20th century.
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Let the Rain Kiss You
“The half-stripped trees / struck by a wind together, / bending all, / snapping before the power of… / thundersnow? / Oh shit, do you see that? / Thundersnow!” It’s safe to say that William Carlos Williams would have been blown away by thundersnow. Here are a few other classic poems helpfully reimagined for the climate change age.
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Man Middle School Was Rough, Huh?
“[B]eing twelve is its own psychosexual dystopian satire, and I was not in on the joke.” Abbey Fenbert writes for Catapult about Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World, reading-while-tween, and being a seventh-grade book censor. See also: our own brave editor-in-chief, Lydia Kiesling, on reading Huxley a week after last November’s election.