Recommended Reading: Sadie Stein on a teen reading Sartre.
Against the Machine
Jamison on Lila
“Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.” Leslie Jamison reviews Marilynne Robinson‘s latest novel, Lila, which was recently longlisted for the National Book Award.
●
●
Slave Driver
Recommended Reading: Katherine Sunderland on Michael Bundock’s The Fortunes of Francis Barber.
“A Grand Experiment”
Year in Reading alum Daniel José Older responds to the writers speaking out against Trump.
A Light Roast, Please
File this one under “Things I Didn’t Know I Needed” — actor Paul Giamatti playing Honoré de Balzac hopped up on fifty coffees.
●
●
The Swamp of the Non-Reader
Jonathan Gourlay used to read all the time, then one day he stopped. “I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp.”
●
●
Here Refrain
Beautiful, shimmer, jetty. Poets Joy Harjo, Claudia Rankine, Robert Pinsky et al. tell Merriam-Webster about their favorite words. Related, and far less pretty: the most-looked-up words post-election include fascism, bigot, and xenophobe.
●
●
All Wrong
“After years of reading, teaching, and writing about the book, though, I’ve come to believe that… our understanding of what is comic and what is serious in Huck Finn says more about America in the last century than America in the time Twain wrote the book.” Andrew Levy writes for Salon about childhood, race, and “dedicated amnesia” in Mark Twain‘s controversial classic.
●
●