Ahead of its mid August movie debut Kevin Kwan talks about the real life inspiration behind his Crazy Rich Asian trilogy. “But the people who know me, who have read the books, and who are also in that world in Singapore, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia, don’t get it.” Refinery29 has more.
Real Life Crazy Rich Inspiration
Valeria Luiselli on Writing Through the Pandemic
Valeria Luiselli on the importance of writers documenting this moment in time, at their own pace and within their own capacity.
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Ask George
Looking to trade memes with the editors of The Paris Review? Not fully convinced that Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein are not in fact related? Then log on to Reddit at 3 PM EST, when the editors will take your questions as part of a joint AMA session.
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German Literature Month
Oktoberfest may be over, but the inaugural German Literature Month is just beginning. If you’re wondering what to imbibe while you sit down with The Sorrows of Young Werther, Magic Mountain, and The Clown, Melville House’s MobyLives blog has you covered.
Careless Cervantes
Ilan Stavans’s introduction to the quadricentennial edition of Don Quixote is available on the Literary Hub website. As he explains it, the narrative is both baffling and perfect: “What I like most about Don Quixote is its imperfection. I wasn’t wrong in my teens about the sloppiness of the writing; it is just that my attitude was too pedantic. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative. Cervantes is often criticized as a numb and careless stylist.”
No Fake Readers
“An appreciation of readers as diverse individuals with different tastes should be a basic tenet of criticism. Instead, it’s common for critics to imagine that their aesthetic preferences are the reflections of “readers” or a special class of readers—“serious readers,” “imaginative readers,” “brave readers,” or some other ill-defined category—whose views truly matter.” Lincoln Michel explains why “there’s no such thing as a fake reader” in an essay for Electric Literature.
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Theories of the Brain
Recommended (Heavy) Reading: A mind-bending interview with Kathinka Evers at 3:AM Magazine on the increasingly important field of “neuroethics.” Neuroethics is, in essence, “the study of the questions that arise when scientific findings about the brain are carried into philosophical analyses, medical practice, legal interpretations, health and social policy.” Welcome to the 21st century.
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Asking To Be Born
“Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.” What would today be without a bit of Mother’s Day-inspired Recommended Reading? Head over to Brain Pickings and learn why psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott believes that mothers are so vital.
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.