“On closer inspection, however, the book comes off as something more complicated than a flowering of one eccentric and filthy man’s erotic imagination. Its elaborate descriptions of pleasure given and taken start to seem like scrims for a moral argument about what sorts of sexual behaviors should be ‘forbid’ and which should be encouraged—an argument refined in prison by an author deeply occupied with thoughts of punishment, dissipation, and sin.” On John Cleland’s (very erotic) novel Fanny Hill and the importance of its having been written in prison.
What Should Be ‘Forbid’
Life as an Afición
Ernest Hemingway was a great drinking buddy as long as you didn’t make any plans with him. At The Moth, author A.E. Hotchner recounts when Hemingway convinced him to be a matador for the day.
The Story Prize 2011 Shortlist
The Story Prize has announced its nominees for the 2011 prize, We Others by Steven Millhauser, Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman, The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo. Our review of the latter was published today.
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Public Solitude
“You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene—the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight—attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality.” Paris Review editor Lorin Stein writes for The New York Times about solitude in the age of the Internet and the future of the book.
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The Birth of the Novel
Recommended Reading: On Herman Melville and his reputation for “being sexually dangerous, and even depraved.”
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Franzen on Film
The Corrections might never make it to screen, but Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on songbird poaching, “Emptying the Skies” (behind the paywall), is already a documentary. The film follows a group of bird lovers trying to save the endangered animals and even includes an interview with Franzen. Although the documentary just found a distributor, there is no word on an official release date. Until then, here’s the trailer.
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“You call that nice? // I call it haiku.”
Recommended Reading: Two new poems by Just Saying author Rae Armantrout.
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ROOSTER!
Did you forget that The Morning News Tournament of Books starts today? If so, I bet you’re glad you saw this reminder. Have fun.
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