Recommended Reading: Over at BOMB Magazine, Jesse Ball and Catherine Lacey discuss strategies for a non-interview, why they write, and poetry’s “direct utility toward experience.”
The Experience of Being Human
The Millions Socializes
●
●
What’s In A Name?
●
●
Dictionary Panics
Recommended reading: on dictionary-related panics from The New Yorker. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s Millions essay “Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.”
●
●
Mo Yan, Euphemism, and Translated Prose
Anna Sun profiles the work of Mo Yan, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. While Sun acknowledges Yan’s popularity and prolific output, she also notes that what the Nobel committee referred to as “hallucinatory prose” is more often than not “repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value.” Indeed, Sun writes, “the English translations of Mo Yan’s novels … are in fact superior to the original.” [Ed. Note: It appears the Kenyon Review link was briefly not working; this Google cache may work better — h/t Dan Farrely]
●
●
Of Transatlantic Manoeuvres and Colourful Sweaters
Our favourite American editor of an across-the-pond publication – Emily Bobrow of More Intelligent Life – chats with The Morning News about Anglo-American stylistic differences: “The English work hard but pretend not to, while Americans often strain to look busy.”
●
●
Known Knowns
Literary fame is a knotty thing. It’s hard to predict exactly who will be known for centuries, and why. William Wordsworth, for example, owes at least part of his fame to the Lake District, which started to use him in their tourist campaigns not long after his death. In The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman takes a look at H.J. Jackson’s Those Who Write for Immortality. Related: Gina Fattore’s recent essay on fame and money.
●
●