Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
Irv Loathed NPR
Appearing Elsewhere
AWP Attendees: Millions editor and founder C. Max Magee will be on a panel at AWP on Friday. “Ask Not What the Internet Can Do for You: Shifting Our Perspective on Internet Publishing as an Alternative to Major Market Publishing” will discuss electronic publications as central to the needs of 21st-century writers and readers, and not as entities serving as secondary iterations of preexisting publications. The panel is at 3pm in Virginia A Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level. See you there!
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The White Knight
Ryan Topper writes for Public Books about Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation and rejects the white savior plot that characterizes many child-soldier narratives. Pair with Noah Deutsch’s Millions review of the novel on which the series was based.
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Norris Church Mailer dead at 61
Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, died yesterday at 61 following a long battle with cancer. Mark Olshaker, president of the Norman Mailer Society, wrote: “She was the pilgrim soul who captured and won Norman’s heart and mind and who shared with him the last three decades of his life.”
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Words came in, marked for death.
The New Yorker has been hosting a Twitter game show, and this time around the contestants were words and in a macabre turn each word was berated by the audience, the people calling out for the death of that contestant. One word was forced to ultimately bite the bullet and will no longer be welcome in the magazine’s next issue. Tragic.
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Endless Depths
Every so often, a piece comes along that rends the fragile mind, employing a devil’s portion of mundane details to lay bare the inescapable futility of all human endeavor. This is the only rational way to describe this piece at The Awl, which takes the form of a conversation between Karl Ove Knausgaard and True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto.
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Offshore Seinfeld
One Indian call center’s “culture training” involves the study of Seinfeld episodes, writes Andrew Marantz. Hopefully they don’t screen the Harold Pinter-inspired episode, “The Betrayal.” Meanwhile, Joshua Kurp has located most of George’s ex-girlfriends.
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