“In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being ‘a lonely, anti-social affair’—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)” It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
Virtual Fictitious Reality
Primary Colors for the Age of Obama
Anonymous strikes again: On January 25th, the entity that brought us 1996's deliciously scandalous Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, offers a roman à clef for the Obama age: O: A Presidential Novel. Then it was Joe Klein, but this Anon. is still Anon. Perhaps better than the insider gossip: The media-fueled whodunit the novel's sure to inspire.
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English Major Drama
At the Missouri Review blog, our own Tess Malone writes about the supposed death of the English major, which has lost a considerable amount of popularity in the last forty years in favor of “practical disciplines.” Among other things, she links to New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s Brandeis commencement speech, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
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Rereading
"I’ve come to understand that I’ll rarely experience that first rush of discovery again, and perhaps that’s the problem with re-reading. It reminds us both of where we’ve been and where we can’t go again." Sarah Seltzer wonders why do we reread books as children but not as adults? Pair with Lisa Levy's essay on "The Pleasures and Perils of Rereading."
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Opiates
“The cause of death/was living/the immediate cause/of death was/living in Moscow.” At n +1's website, Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich excerpt their translations of the Soviet poet Vsevolod Nekrasov.
Immigrant Song
Why are Americans so enamored by immigrant fiction but rarely read anything in translation? David Naimon and Gary Shteyngart discuss this and more in the latest Between The Covers podcast. Shteyngart's latest book, Little Failure, was part of our 2014 book preview.
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A Bookish Lament
Recommended reading: "A Book Buyer's Lament," from Ken Kalfus for the New Yorker.
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