Recommended Reading: Against crowdfunding websites that marketize goodwill.
The Economy of Goodwill
Brooklyn Was Mine
Paula Fox‘s ostensible review of L.J. Davis‘ A Meaningful Life in the current New York Review of Books is really (pace N1BR) a transporting memoir of Brooklyn in the ’70s.
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Fiction in Motion
If you see something, read something: Yesterday New York City’s MTA launched Subway Reads, an eight-week-long initiative allowing strap-hangers to download novellas, short stories, or excerpts from books via the city’s new(ish) wi-fi service in 175 underground stations. They’ve even timed the length of Which news in turn begs the question: what would Borges say?
4chan in Literature
Cole Stryker‘s Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan’s Army Conquered the Web looks into one of the internet’s most infamous image boards. Housing Works Bookstore will be hosting a party in September to celebrate its launch. To tide you over, you can check out the author’s interview at Betabeat.
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Hilary Mantel’s Hospital Diary
“In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled… When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?” Hilary Mantel writes a diary on hospitalization for the London Review of Books.
“For the sake of having something to celebrate”
As part of their collaboration with the fiction editors at Five Chapters, the folks at Salon posted a story from A Guide to Being Born, the new collection by Millions contributor Ramona Ausubel.
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Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
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An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
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