Following on the success of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix teases a first trailer for its take on Alias Grace. Read our review of the former here.
Alias Atwood
Like Moss
“Like moss, my family grew on a mountain. In the utmost northwest of Spain, they set down roots so thick that only despair could rip them out.” Lorena Piñeiro writes at Midnight Breakfast about her family and penance. Pair with a piece on the business of nonfiction.
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Do Not Pass Go.
Christopher Ketcham takes Harper’s readers through the “antimonopolist history” of Monopoly, “the world’s most popular board game.”
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Tuesday New Release Day
Milan Kundera’s new collection of essays, Encounter, is now out. And for those still trying to figure out Inception, the shooting script has been published.
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Mary McCarthy’s Recycled Fiction
Perhaps best known for her fiction, specifically her classic The Group, Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by chance. “McCarthy was good at recycling – a term which she used herself – and good, also, as she admitted, at plagiarizing her own life. Nevertheless, her fiction lives, and some of it has been highly influential.” Margaret Drabble takes us through McCarthy’s major works of fiction, featured in Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction which was released this year in a deluxe collection for the very first time.
In Defense of Unread Books
According to Karen Hopkin, a house full of books—whether they're read or not—enhances intellectual capacity and literary habits.
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Earnest Jest
For Atlas Obscura, Tucker Leighty-Phillips writes on how a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook, introduced to English readers by Mark Twain, became a comedy sensation. Pair with this Millions piece on Twain’s travels.
This Side of Criticism
F. Scott Fitzgerald called himself “a moralist at heart,” which might be why Kathryn Schulz finds The Great Gatsby to be “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent.”
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