Frederick Tuten recalls the first fan letter he ever wrote to novelist Jenny Diski in his 1999 interview with the author for BOMB Magazine.
Remembering Jenny Diski
More Elmore Leonard on the Way
Although we’re still mourning the death of Elmore Leonard, we might have another book from him. His son, Peter Leonard, plans to finish his father’s 46th novel, Blue Dreams. Expect more of Leonard’s favorite federal marshal, Raylan Givens.
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Felt Time
“As phenomenological philosophy has determined, self-consciousness is not a mental state that is added on to our experience, or that is particular; rather, it is a feature inherent in all experience. My perception contains me.” Send your Sunday into an existential tailspin with German psychologist Marc Wittmann and his heady ideas about the notion of time and consciousness.
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Be Quiet, I’m Reading
“Hamlet’s famous last words—’The rest is silence’—are less punning than ironic, since both his parting, eloquent gasps and his death play out amidst a growing bassline beat. ‘What warlike noise is this?’ Hamlet asks as the poison takes hold. The drums and commotion signal the arrival of the Norwegian crown prince Fortinbras, who bursts into the quiet of the massacred Danish court. From the beginning of Hamlet, we’re taught to think of sovereignty as a manipulation of sound waves.” What does silence mean in this age of constant digital noise? The Literary Hub takes a look.
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The Apples Are a Gift
“This poem fosters reading again and again, because interpretation is always reaching its limits: eventually, one runs up against a secret gesture to which the only response is either to acknowledge that there is some other conscious being that could make or decipher it, or to fantasize the being that could.” A long, worthwhile review of R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems from 3:AM Magazine.
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Saturday Fiction with Faber and Gay
You can listen to stories by Michel Faber and Roxane Gay over at WNYC’s website. Gay’s piece, which is performed by Adepero Oduye, was recently selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories.
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Stop reading this immediately
“Internet reading takes up my time without my setting that time aside for it, and fills me with images and thoughts that I don’t perceive going in, like radiation… In these online minutes or hours, I drift along with my mouth open, absorbing whatever’s floating by, never chewing or even swallowing, just letting it all seep pre-chewed into me”: an elegant argument against reading about books before you read the books in question at Electric Literature. (But we hope you’ll continue to read The Millions anyway.)
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