The Guardian has a list of its five favorite on-campus novels, including Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Marriage Plot, which we ran an excerpt of back when it came out, and Donna Tartt‘s The Secret History, whose connections to the academy we’ve also explored on the site.
Back to School
Lewis Explains Obama’s Way
The Big Short author Michael Lewis hung out with president Barack Obama for six months, and a 13,638-word profile is what ensued.
P.S.
The summer issue of Prairie Schooner has a short story of mine in it, as well as other good stuff, for most of which a subscription is required. You don’t need one, however, to read this short interview (very much in keeping with the Where We Write theme).
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The Road on Which You Are Traveling Is a Very Bad Road
New York Times travel editor Monica Drake recounts visiting Antigua after reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place—a sharp critique of tourism and the colonialist narrative around the island. As she puts it, “For all the drama of its history, […] the beauty of the place, the very thing that bewitches its tourists, renders it a time capsule to its residents.”
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Curiosities: Cartoon Batting Averages
Colson Whitehead says “Wow, Fiction Works!“The LA Times has a clip from the movie version of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, directed by The Office star John Krasinski. (via)Carolyn writes about the real-life connection between Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen.The Village Voice shows off the final results of its highly scientific system of determining New Yorker cartoonists’ batting averages.Cambridge Information Group, which owns Bowker, AquaBrowser, ProQuest, Serials Solutions and RefWorks makes an investment in LibraryThing.Vote in The 2009 Tournament of Books Zombie Poll.A book that has turned out to be so wrong it has become a collectors item (check out the prices): The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy
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The Rise of the Typo
In the Times, Virginia Heffernan bemoans how technology and the economic struggles of the publishing industry are leading to an increasing number of typos in books. However: “The Pollyannish upside to writerly inattention and cutbacks in publishing, then, is that readers sometimes see more of the human writer, and less buff and polish.”
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Neil Gaiman’s Video Game
Neil Gaiman announced the launch of his first video game, Wayward Manor. The horror-fantasy author (whose latest book was recently reviewed by our own Tess Malone) told Mashable that the game follows “the misadventures of a ghost who wants nothing more than a peaceful afterlife.”
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“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
Have you ever wanted to take a road trip like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise? You can now. Gregor Weichbrodt used Google Maps to write directions for On The Road’s famous 7,527-mile drive. Choose your companions wisely, so you don’t get stuck with dysentery in Mexico.
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The Inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin
A professor at Clemson University believes he’s identified the fugitive slave who was harbored for one night in the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Moreover, the professor believes that the man was “an inspiration for the novel [Uncle Tom’s Cabin]. I think his pain touched [Stowe] and helped her to act.”
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Richard Russo’s STRAIGHT MAN, should be on that list.
I’d also vote for Galatea 2.2 and White Noise, if we’re amending!