“Could I write a novel about fugues in the form of a fugue?” Margot Singer wonders in The Paris Review, remembering the process of writing her first novel and considering other authors – Joyce, Nabokov, Woolf – who have tried to compose words musically. See also: our own Jacob Lambert on whether to write with background music on.
In a Fugue State
JJS to LARB
"Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?" asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. "He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists."
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What Happens at Pogofest Stays at Pogofest
"Wasn’t Pogofest the type of idea barely solvent towns pay marketing consultants millions of dollars to avoid? Who was Pogofest supposed to appeal to, besides—thirty years after the fact—me? I pose the question to Janice Parks, a former city commissioner. 'Well, look what a rat did for the wasteland of Central California,' she says." A bizarre, slightly surreal look at Waycross, Georgia -- the self-proclaimed hometown of Pogo Possum.
“He says, ‘their hearts should be burned.’”
Jeff Sharlet traveled to Russia because he “wanted to see what ordinary LGBT life was like in a nation whose leaders have decided that ‘homosexualism’ is a threat to its ‘sexual sovereignty.’” What he found was unsettling and terrifying, but the courage of the LGBT community members he interviewed is also incredibly inspiring. Set aside time to read this one. It's essential.
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Mini Anthology, Major Writers
Ninth Letter recently launched "Only Silence Will Never Betray You," a mini-anthology of contemporary Bulgarian writers. Editor-at-Large Philip Graham introduces the five writers: Ivayla Alexandrova, Bistra Andreeva, Nikolai Grozni, Georgi Gospodinov, and Marin Bodakov. From our archives: our 2013 interview with Grozni.
To the Stars and Beyond
Very exciting news for space nerds: NASA just opened its research library to the public for free. Pair with our suggestions for the best fiction to send into space.
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Misprint: Nabokov
Thanks Robin! Corrected.
Anthony Burgess accomplished that feat.
Beamish!
Well-read you are! I went off AB but 15 years ago I read (and owned) almost every novel (and a few books more) he’d written. Something in Earthly Powers irritated me and the spell was broken… and I must admit I never finished “Napoleon Symphony” (is that the book, or one of the books, you mean?), which was slyly… embarrassingly? dedicated to Kubrick. The problem with AB’s “musical writing” (that is, writing prose to mimic musical effects): you can’t really produce parallel constructions, for the reader, in Lit… there’s no polyphony. You have to make do with Gregorian chants!