Wendy Willis advises us on how to deal with bros like Donald Trump and Robert Bly. Pair with Greg Chase’s recent piece on understanding the Trump supporter through Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.
Dealing with Bros
Remembering Nora Ephron
The New York Times looks back on Nora Ephron’s career and celebrates her distinct tone. EW has collected some of the best quotes from her books. Ariel Levy recalls her first encounter with Ephron’s “funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate” voice.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Falcones; Fallada; Kristeva; le Carré; Anh; Twain
Out this week: The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones; A Stranger in My Own Country by Hans Fallada; Teresa, My Love by Julia Kristeva; an omnibus edition of John le Carré’s first three novels; Ticket to Childhood by Nguyen Nhat Anh; and a new volume of letters by Mark Twain. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
●
●
Temper That Ego. You Need Luck As Well.
A few weeks ago, Benjamin Hale wrote an article for us about the trivialities and happenstance associated with publishing prizes. His point was that legacy was more important than short-lived fame. In a way, his piece is nicely supplemented by Tom Bissell’s essay on the luck and chance necessary to attain literary success.
Appearing Elsewhere: DFW Roundtable
Along with D.T. Max, Laura Miller, and Jason Kottke, I’ll be participating in this week’s discussion of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace over at New York Magazine.
Border Borrowing
The Haskell Free Library straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. Enter the library in the United States, and browse through the books in Canada.
●
●
Producing The Counselor
When The Counselor (trailer here) opens in theaters this month, the occasion will mark a career milestone for Cormac McCarthy. The 80-year-old novelist has been writing original screenplays since the 1970s, but only one of them – a made-for-TV movie called The Gardener’s Son – was produced before this latest effort. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter takes a look at the author’s involvement in the production of The Counselor, as well as its reception by several film industry insiders and devout McCarthy fans. (“McCarthy writing a sex scene is maybe not a great idea,” one of them says.)
●
●
Scent of a Woman
What happens when a grown woman wears a ton of Axe body spray? The question is nightmare fuel, but Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick — in what can only be described as a heroic act of journalism — doused herself in America’s most notorious fragrance for a week to see how it felt.
●
●
Choose Your Own Apocalypse: Skynet or Stingrays
With the help of Our Final Hour author Martin Rees, Cambridge will soon open a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The Centre will investigate the threats posed by “artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.” To my ears, this sounds an awful lot like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was memorably depicted in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs.”
●
●