Recommended Reading: Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti discuss literary ambition and the price of success.
Writing About Oneself
Merry Pranksters
"No drugs on the bus!" Take a road trip with poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and some other really fantastic poets.
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Between Life and Death
Over at the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines the scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, from resuscitation to galvanism.
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Book Boredom
Laura Miller discusses what she didn't read this year.
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The Son
He befriended Mark Twain. His father wrote The Scarlet Letter. He drank wine with Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and Henry James, and William Randolph Hearst once hired him as a reporter. He even published a few books to critical acclaim. So why do so few of us know anything about Julian Hawthorne? In the WaPo, Michael Dirda reviews a new biography. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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Oh, Kafka, we always reference you in times of simultaneous weirdness and banality.
"The story of how Kafka's papers made their way into an apartment owned by a self-professed cat lady, Eva Hoffe, seems like a story only Kafka himself could have written." If you say so, NPR.
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Marty the Monster
True Detective ended weeks ago, but someone once told me, “Time is a flat circle,” and that everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And this piece on the show’s finale by Lili Loofbourow is going to be the best one you’ll read on the internet again and again and again forever. (Bonus: Our own Ujala Sehgal crafted a reading list based on one of the show’s [missing] elements.)
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