The passing of Muhammad Ali was sad for fans of both sports and greatness alike. One little known Ali fact is that he once composed a line-for-line sonnet with another one of “the greatest,” the poet Marianne Moore. Let none other than George Plimpton explain it to you.
Greater and Greater
The Best of Peter Matthiessen
To honor Peter Matthiessen, who passed away over the weekend, The New Yorker unlocked part of one of the author’s best pieces of travel writing. The piece, titled “The Last Wilderness,” follows Matthiessen as he travels down the Amazon River. (His last novel comes out this week, as well.)
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…And If You Still Want More on The Pale King
I can’t recommend John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s 7,000-word article on The Pale King highly enough – not because he gets everything right, but because it’s what long-form writing about books should look like: passionate, lucid, wide-ranging, and awfully fun to read. I salute GQ for running it, and hope to see more literary coverage there in the future.
New from Ann Beattie
In the Fall 2015 issue of VQR, check out new fiction from Ann Beattie. You could also read our recent interview with the author.
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Democracy Sausage
“[T]he term was first recorded in 2012, but its use increased significantly during the federal election this year, especially with the popularity of several websites set up to help voters find polling stations with sausage sizzles.” Australia’s word of the year is “democracy sausage,” reports The Canberra Times. Other national choices, according to Mental Floss: postfaktisch, or “post-truth” in Germany, and the 52-letter-long Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung, or “postponement of the repeat runoff of the presidential election” in Austria.
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Two Good Things
USA Today is running an excerpt of Denis Johnson’s much buzzed about new doorstop Tree of Smoke.The New Yorker Food Issue, to my mind the highlight of the New Yorker publishing year, has arrived. Somehow I look forward to this one as much as I did the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue when I was twelve. Much of the good stuff isn’t online, but you can get a taste of the food writing on offer with a series of short essays under theme “Family Dinner.” Aleksandar Hemon, Gary Shteyngart, Nell Freudenberger, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Sedaris, Anthony Lane, and Donald Antrim are on the menu.
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Nabokov Speech Published in English for the First Time
In 1925 Nabokov delivered a colorful talk on boxing to a circle of Russian émigrés living in Berlin. Yesterday, that pugnacious passage was published for the first time in English.
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Saying Without Saying
Giles Harvey discusses the ways in which Anton Chekhov’s characters — as dramatized in his stories and a new stage production — “long to express their innermost desires … but instead they find themselves saying things like, ‘Why did I go out to lunch?’ “
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Lydia Takes the Bronze!
Congratulations to our own Lydia Kiesling whose essay “Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk” has taken third place in the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Arts & Literature as judged by Robert Pinsky.
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