“The novel is told from the perspective of an unnamed African-American narrator who considers himself to be socially invisible due to the color of his skin,” writes Variety. Following in the footsteps of its adaptation of Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu is in the beginning stages of adapting Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man. Read our own editor Lydia Kiesling on Ellison’s Invisible Man.
The Not-So-Invisible Man
Primary Colors for the Age of Obama
Anonymous strikes again: On January 25th, the entity that brought us 1996’s deliciously scandalous Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, offers a roman à clef for the Obama age: O: A Presidential Novel. Then it was Joe Klein, but this Anon. is still Anon. Perhaps better than the insider gossip: The media-fueled whodunit the novel’s sure to inspire.
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Everything That Rises Must Be Filmed
Recommended Listening: this episode of the Ryder + Flye podcast in which Jason Diamond and Margaret Eby discuss Southern Catholicism, 70s cinema, and why it’s so darn hard to make Flannery O’Connor’s stories work on the screen.
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First Dads
“What does each president’s fitness for parenthood reveal about his fitness to run our country?” Daniel Jones reviews First Dads by Joshua Kendall, which takes an inside look at the fathers of our nation. You could also check out our own Janet Potter’s project to read a biography of every sitting president.
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NY Approves the Rushdie Rip
Zoë Heller’s takedown of Salman Rushdie in the NYRB may yet ruffle some feathers, but for now it’s nabbed the top spot on New York Magazine’s approval matrix.
Clickity Clack
Where did Modernism come from? Did it spring from the alienation engendered by the nineteenth century? Or did it spring instead from — as Hannah Sullivan argues in her new book, The Work of Revision — the typewriter?
Victoria Chang on the Humor and Oddity in Obituaries
Victoria Chang discusses the art of the obituary poem, as seen in her newest collection, Obit, a memorial to the dead and a reflection on grief.
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