“As much as there is an evergreen fascination for Christie’s stories, there’s also an alluring air of mystery surrounding the woman herself.” Broadly explores the enduring nature of Agatha Christie‘s stories, the recent surge in adaptations (including Murder on the Orient Express), and the mysterious 11-day disappearance of the writer herself. From our archives: an essay on the sometimes inherent predictability of the mystery genre.
The Return of Agatha Christie
I Grow Old
"If there is one thing more depressing than reading other people’s old letters it is reading one’s own." Becoming T. S. Eliot.
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August: Osage County to Film
Tracy Letts' outstanding play August: Osage County was tapped for a movie adaptation back in 2010, but the project seemed to fall by the wayside shortly after. Then, last week, Bob Weinstein (of The Weinstein Company) announced the adaptation will begin filming this fall. It'll star Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. You can read an excerpt from the play on our Tumblr.
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Weekend Reading: David Foster Wallace Edition
Looking for something to read this weekend? Perhaps you should work your way through The Electric Typewriter’s round-up of 19 essays by David Foster Wallace.
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Amazon Plans for Zombies
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The Southern Festival of Books
Last weekend The Southern Festival of Books took over Nashville. The latest installment of #LitBeat takes you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's panel there, on the importance of studying--but not romanticizing--history.
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Flaws of Hitch
The recent passing of Christopher Hitchens has led to numerous praiseful eulogies. Many have been (and he would've hated this…) hagiographic. Now, in an article for The Nation, Katha Pollitt seeks to "complicate the picture … at the risk of seeming churlish" to allege that the man "had virtually no interest in women's writing or women's lives or perspectives."
They call it an accident, a catastrophe. But it was a war.
n+1 publishes a chilling personal account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, as the crisis mounts at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
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