Check out new fiction from You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine author Alexandra Kleeman.
Choking Hazard
Bloomberg’s Daughter
“When a writer is born into a family,” wrote poet Czeslaw Milosz, “that family is finished.” Well, now Michael Bloomberg can say goodbye to his family. Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of New York City’s three-term mayor, has penned The A Circuit a roman a clef about the daughter of blunt-talking Wall Street billionaire who “owns half of New York.”
Not Super Idealized
Recommended Reading: This interview from Full Stop with Lisa Hanawalt, producer and production designer of the Netflix series BoJack Horseman: “We aren’t supposed to openly discuss shitting in polite society, so making artwork that frankly portrays it is titillating. I think it’s called ‘desublimation’ in fancy art-school terms, but it’s going back to a childish, playing around in our own muck state, and that’s why it’s as fun and appealing as it is repulsive.”
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Writing Workshops LA: The Conference
Writing Workshops LA – which was founded by our own Edan Lepucki – is hosting “The Conference” on June 28 of this year, and the day-long event will consist of “educational and thoughtful panel discussions as well as smaller, in-depth presentations and workshops aimed at informing and inspiring every attendee.” Presenters will include award-winning literary agents, editors, and writers including Joanna Rakoff, Adam Wilson, David L. Ulin, Counterpoint’s Dan Smetanka, and Daniel Gumbiner of McSweeney’s. Don’t miss your chance to sign up for the early bird special before April 15th – the first 40 attendees will also get an invitation to a literary pub quiz event the night before.
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DeAndre McCullough Dies
DeAndre McCullough died last week at the age of 35. McCullough was famously portrayed as the young protagonist in David Simon and Edward Burns’s book The Corner, which went on to become its own HBO miniseries. The Wire later adopted aspects from both the book and the miniseries. The obituary Simon wrote is not to be missed.
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Read, Watch, Binge
As a part of their Read, Watch, Binge! summer series, NPR recommends TV series, movies, books, and more based on 60 of their readers favorite books. If you’re looking for more books, check out our Great Second-Half Fiction Preview.
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A Necessary Push Forward
Muna Mire has written an incisive and timely essay for The New Inquiry on the Black Feminist classic Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace. Coinciding with last month’s reissue of Black Macho by Verso Books, Mire’s essay discusses justified anger rightly-directed and the potential utility of Wallace’s “Black Movement” in the context of today’s racially-charged political climate.
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Jane at 40
The Austen Project, launched last year, asks prominent contemporary writers to reimagine Jane Austen’s classics in modern times. (Thus far, we’ve seen Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility and Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey.) In perhaps the most significant adaptation yet, Curtis Sittenfeld has announced that her Pride and Prejudice will feature a 39-year-old Jane Bennet. After all, Jane (23 in the original novel), is “pretty much teetering on the edge of spinsterhood.”
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I’m sorry but this is a terrible story. Good gosh. I thought Kleeman was supposed to represent the new avant garde. This is straight out of an undergrad fiction workshop. Plot, prose, characterization all tedious. Yet this will be the only piece of fiction many people read this week. Contemporary American lit has so much more to offer than this. Fiction can be inventive, funny, fun, emotionally resonant, edgy…alive…this has all the life of a last-minute high school English paper.
Yipes! Agreed. I’ve read a hundred pieces as time-wastingly “okay” (until that amateurish finish) as that, online, in the past year or so. Why is that particular not bad/not good thing in the NYer? I can only imagine a shrug in response.