“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.” Chinese censors have cracked down on social media sites following the death and hushed burial-at-sea of writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo last week, reports The New York Times.
Scared of the Dead
Lit Mag Book Trailer
Electric Literature teamed up with animator Jonathan Ashley and musician Nick DeWitt to produce an animated trailer for Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a story which appeared in the literary magazine’s first issue.
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Obscene and Digitized at Last
Need a giggle? You can now access the British Library’s collection of obscene writing online, which have previously been locked up for over a century. The newly digitized collection includes the works of the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Stretzer, and more.
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That Which I Love
Recommended Reading: This jarring, surreal “amalgamation of three different pieces” on Hannah Arendt by Bobbi Lurie over at 3:AM Magazine. Arendt, herself a political theorist, would likely have appreciated this piece from The Millions on the life and afterlife of literary theory.
Je Ne Sais Quois
Chances are you’ve heard that the most important thing a writer needs to make it in the modern lit world is luck. Undoubtedly, there’s a lot of truth to that, but what if there’s another factor that has a bigger impact on a writer’s success? Sean McElwee argues for the importance of something more prosaic.
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Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?
“What [Vladimir] Nabokov is actually doing in Lolita is deliberately drawing on all manner of anti-Semitic propaganda, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nazi caricatures of the Jewish ‘type,’ to create in Humbert Humbert the anti-Semitic cliché of legend, rather as, say, Chaucer draws on medieval misogynist writings to create in the figure of the Wife of Bath the archetypal shrew of his male audience’s nightmares.”