A V.I.G. (very important garment) will be making its way to the U.S. this August. Pride and Prejudice fans can now see the shirt Colin Firth wore as Mr. Darcy in the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity.” We rewrote the title of Pride and Prejudice and other books as clickbait. You should definitely read it.
V. I. G.
Writing a New Canon
Over at VICE, Karan Mahajan, Tanwi Nandini Islam, and Jenny Zhang talked about the new generation of Asian American writers. “There isn’t really a canon, which means if you are Asian American and writing, you’re automatically adding to it. Once I realized this, I became extremely protective of my writing,” said Zhang. Pair with this Millions interview with Mahajan.
Yes.
Your dandruff falls like the fixtures within a scenic railway passing through a thousand bearded rainbows… Compliment courtesy of the Surrealist Compliment Generator! (Via.)
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Tuesday New Release Day: Abbott, Powell, Stedman, Wagner
Megan Abbott’s Dare Me is out today. Learn more about her in an essay we published a year ago. Also out are You & Me by Padgett Powell, ML Stedman’s debut novel The Light Between the Oceans, and Dead Stars by L.A. great Bruce Wagner.
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RIP Robert Stone
RIP Robert Stone, who passed away at his home in Key West on Saturday. The author, who won the National Book Award in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers, was 77. You can get a sense of his work by reading Tatjana Soli’s review of his story collection Fun with Problems.
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The Real Racist
One thing that pretty much everyone can agree on is that Go Set a Watchman is a controversial book. Our own Michael Bourne said it “fails as a work of art in every way except as a corrective to the standard sentimental reading of Atticus Finch.” At Slate, Dan Kois, Meghan O’Rourke and Katy Waldman debate the main questions the novel raised.
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Book Five: Still Strugglin’
Recommended (Long) Reading: This lengthy excerpt from the latest book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. In it, Knausgaard is introduced to the literary world and stresses a great deal over his own claims to artistic merit: “Deep down, I was decent and proper, a goody-goody, and, I thought, perhaps that was also why I couldn’t write. I wasn’t wild enough, not artistic enough, in short, much too normal for my writing to take off. What had made me believe anything else? Oh, but this was the life-lie.”
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