“Macbeth has a twist that sets it apart from every other Shakespearean tragedy: Macbeth murders his voice. Mad with fear that Banquo’s heirs will seize the throne, Macbeth has Banquo killed. After that, our antihero is on his own. There is no one left to verify what is real and what is not … When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.” This excerpt from Jillian Keenan’s Sex With Shakespeare touches on everything from sexuality in Singapore to The O.C. fan-fiction.
Hearing the Voices
You are Katniss
Ever spent the whole day reading The Hunger Games and then found yourself paranoid that a tribute was following you? Don't worry; you aren't crazy. Turns out that reading a really gripping novel can cause our brains to believe we are in the body of the protagonist, and this effect can last for days after reading according to a scientific study.
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Song of Myself
At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell delves into the history of the self-interview, which you can find many examples of over at The Nervous Breakdown. Mark cites examples of self-interviews by prominent writers, including Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Year in Reading alum John Banville.
From Abkhazia to Zimbabwe
"[W]e can confirm that there is no place on Earth (not even Antarctica) that literature isn’t written." Michael Barron, the U.S. literary editor for Culture Trip, curates "The Global Anthology," an online project showcasing more than 220 pieces of literature from all over the world written in or translated into English (via Moby Lives).
Birnbaum and Giraldi
Robert Birnbaum talks to William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters, about Val Kilmer, Diana Ross, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other topics.
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Julie & Julia Revisited
Julie Powell "masters the art of French cooking" on her iPad.
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There Now
It's fitting in a strange way that the author of Being There is now the subject of an oddball novel-turned-biography. In the Times, Benjamin Markovits reads Jerome Charyn's book Jerzy, which gives the life of Jerzy Kosinski a treatment he'd likely appreciate.
“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”
In 1946, George Orwell wrote that political prose was formed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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