“Everything I learned about writing, I learned from watching people.” David Sedaris talks with The Rumpus about IHOP and his newly published collection of diary entries Theft by Finding.
Formative Pancakes
What’s Wrong with a Readable Book?
There is a controversy brewing right now in Britain about readability and excellence in literature. Apparently, being "readable" is no longer a compliment.
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Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
“Archetypal and chthonic”
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Party Crasher
Those of you with some knowledge of Pale Fire and Lolita won't be surprised to learn what Nabokov thought of dinner parties. Namely, he thought they were awful, vaguely surreal events, held largely by drunkards with overriding appetites for drama. At The Paris Review Daily, Sadie Stein quotes a passage from “The Vane Sisters” to explain why "It’s hard to think of someone you’d want less at a midcentury faculty tea, save maybe a seething Shirley Jackson.” You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor.
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On Pauline
"It is impossible to ignore the ways in which [Pauline] Kael’s gender makes her a target," writes Amanda Shubert as she reviews the oft-criticized movie critic, subject of the new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark.
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New Paris Review Board Members
Word came out yesterday that Jonathan Galassi and Year in Reading alum Mona Simpson will join the Paris Review editorial board. Former editors both -- Galassi edited the magazine’s poetry, while Simpson edited its fiction -- the two will join Rose Styron, Jeffrey Eugenides and other notable figures on the board. Simpson also has a new novel coming out in April.