When asked about his tenure as a professor of creative writing, Harry Crews used to say, “I may be at the university, but I damn sure ain’t of the university.” But in talking to his former students, Crews’s biographer, Ted Geltner, found that in spite of the writer’s efforts to distance himself from academia, he really was a passionate, memorable teacher. (Bonus: Yours truly named one Crews work his “most representative” Florida book.)
Class with Harry Crews
We Think Alone, But We Email Each Other
“I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people – to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent – the more mundane the better,” writes Miranda July in the treatment for her latest project, We Think Alone, which counts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Etgar Keret, and Kirsten Dunst among its participants. “How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view.”
Jack Ryan is Real
Jack Ryan really exists and even teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. Vulture’s Dan Solomon met the real Jack Ryan and discussed what it’s like to have the same name as Tom Clancy’s hero. No, he has never used the connection as a pick-up line. Pair with: Our in memoriam of Clancy.
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New Releases: The Classics
With the frenzied holiday season underway, there aren’t many new releases to look at this week, but there are some newly reissued classics hitting shelves. NYRB Classics has put out Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant and Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman. Vintage, meanwhile, has smart looking new editions of a pair of Somerset Maugham books: The Narrow Corner and A Writer’s Notebook.
George Eliot & Siblings
Recommended reading: Sara Paretsky writes for The Independent on George Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss and the sibling bond so seldom portrayed in English fiction.
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Salvador Dalí Illustrates the Western Canon
Few people know about Salvador Dalí's illustrations for famous works of the Western canon, including Don Quixote, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and even The Bible.
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Do Not Lick the Books
Designboom has your library porn for the day. Pair with Daniel Penev‘s appreciation of public libraries the world ’round.
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Born Weird
Meet the man who calls his own fans “scum,” R. Crumb. Crumb first rose to prominence after the 1968 debut of Zap Comix, the first of the majorly successful “underground comix” publications. His work with legendary poet Charles Bukowski is worth taking a look.
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