Are you familiar with the term, “clatterdevengeance”? It’s the favorite word of Jonathon Green, purveyor of the internet’s newest dirty slang dictionary, which seeks to document some of the more hilarious (and uncouth) experiments in the English language.
Ramsquaddled and Pixellated
Costume Drama
Callan Wink, the Wyoming writer who’s published two stories in The New Yorker since 2011, has a new story, “One More Last Stand,” in Granta’s Spring issue. Among other things, it depicts the oddly frightening “heat of battle re-enactment.”
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Infographic: Shakespeare, Murder, and Pies
This week in book-related infographics: a look at the deaths and murders in Shakespeare‘s works. Our favorite illustration? The pies that once were Chiron and Demetrius (from Titus Andronicus).
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You are Muriel Spark
“The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet.” If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton’s article at The Toast. We aren’t surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.
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Modern Canterbury Tales
If Chaucer lived today, The Canterbury Tales might look a little bit like this.
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Now I know my þ, ƿ, œs
There used to be 32 letters in the English alphabet, but that seems quaint when you consider the fact that iPhone users have access to 1,767 unique emoji. Then again, as Gretchen McCulloch explains, emoji aren’t exactly a dire threat to the written word.
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What Bloggers Owe Montaigne
At the Paris Review Daily, a post on what bloggers owe Montaigne: “There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.” (via Book Bench)
Liberals! Satiricists! Call Out the Big Dogs!
Steve Almond treks deeper into familiar territory in the latest issue of The Baffler, wherein the essayist takes on “our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” an undoubtedly strong “testament to our own impoverished comic standards.” Indeed, Almond notes, our satirists and comics today remain “careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”
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Baby Shoes Still Unworn
“These stories feature hookups and breakups, substance abuse, and violence so casual it’s as natural as jagged breathing.” Electric Literature has an interview between flash fiction author Len Kuntz and critic and writer David Galef, whose Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook was just published by Columbia University Press. The two discuss the state of short fiction, their favorite one-line stories of the year, and how, even in the briefest of narratives, readers should still “feel a connection to the story and characters.” For more ultra-lean tales, see our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s review of Hint Fiction, an anthology of 25-words-and-under short stories.
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