“[T]hat might be what liberal readers needs right now: Not just portraits of the Brexit and Trump-voting domestic Other, but a clearer sense of their own worldview’s limits, blind spots, blunders and internal contradictions.” The New York Times‘s Ross Douthat assembles a “Books for the Trump Era” reading list, including Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Christopher Lasch‘s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and Samuel P. Huntington‘s Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity. You can also read our own review of Houellebecq’s latest here.
Books for the Trump Era
McCann and Hemon in Conversation
The kind folks at the PEN American Center recorded Colum McCann’s recent conversation with author and soccer ace Aleksandar Hemon. Listen to the pair discuss the Western distinction between fiction and non-fiction, and also the hypothetical merits of “watching a potato.”
I’m Good
In a way, this is the opposite of an interview: a series of conversations held exclusively between chatbots. At n+1, Nick Levine constructs dialogue straight out of Beckett. Pair with Houmon Barekat on Finn Brunton’s history of spam.
Milton’s Shakespearean Marginalia
In a copy of Shakespeare's first folio, researchers found a hand-written annotation by none other than Paradise Lost author John Milton.
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Visionary
At the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Tallis reviews Hallucinations, a new book by Oliver Sacks that defines “sensational consciousness.”
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The Help: Feel-Good or Offensive?
Though it had a promising box office debut, The Help is ruffling some feathers for its portrayal of African American women. Roxane Gay sums things up nicely for The Rumpus.
No Matter How Small
Over at The Atlantic, Lydia Millet argues for the power and legitimacy of The Lorax’s moral message. Millet believes that the heavy-handedness of activist-minded fiction like The Lorax is powerful partly due to “its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.”
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