So does literature really have the power to bring liberals and conservatives together? Probably not. Either way, this is still a fascinating study: “The ‘most startling result was this: it was conservative — not liberal — readers who are most active in producing this space of cultural compromise.’ Basically, within this sample size, conservative readers tended to exude more generous praise for ‘bridge books’ and did so with a vernacular considered to be ‘less heated or emotional.’ Grammatically, they also expressed ‘more complex thoughts.'”
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
On the Mark
My Roommate
As literary apprenticeships go, it’s hard to beat a chance to live with Doris Lessing. In 1963, not long after the death of Sylvia Plath, Jenny Diski moved in with the future Nobel laureate, who lived just north of King’s Cross in London at the time. In the LRB, Diski recounts her friendship with the novelist.
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An Inquiring Mind
“I say peel back the immediate surface layer and let’s see what’s actually underneath, if it’s possible to find that out. As a child, of course, I grew up looking under dead logs to see if there might be a newt. Most of the time there wasn’t a newt. Sometimes there was.” Margaret Atwood talks newts and skepticism in a new interview over at Hazlitt. Atwood’s newest, The Heart Goes Last, is out now.
Good Gugge-mugga!
Congratulations to the new group of Guggenheim Fellows in fiction and nonfiction, which, in addition to such luminaries as Kiran Desai and Colson Whitehead, includes past Millions contributors J.C. Hallman, Terese Svoboda, and Ben Marcus.
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Still Neglected
In 1970 The American Scholar published a list of works that “distinguished men and women” deemed neglected. Now, inspired by a LitHub essay on “10 Great Writers Nobody Reads,” the Scholar‘s editors are revisiting those neglected books to see if anything’s changed. Pair their efforts with Claire Cameron‘s look at the unlikely rise of the once-neglected Stoner.
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The Book Guy
Whether or not you’re an avid collector of NYRB Classics like Stoner, you’ll enjoy this profile of series publisher Edwin Frank, conducted by Millions contributor and Oyster Editorial Director Kevin Nguyen. In the profile, Frank delves into the mindset that guides his choices, tying the rise of the American publishing series to the passage of the GI bill. Sample quote: “Someone seeing a book he or she always loved next to a book he or she had never heard about would say, ‘Wait that’s the book I always loved and it’s back in print, maybe I should buy this one too.’”
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