“A subject to which intellectuals never give a thought,” wrote Isabelle Eberhardt in a notebook, “is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom.” The Paris Review‘s excellent column, “Feminize Your Canon,” returns with Eberhardt, a cross-dressing Swiss explorer and author who published under a male pseudonym as a teenager. Learn about her uncompromising life filled with intrigue, adventure, and passion.
Isabelle Eberhardt, Dependent on Chance
Literature for the Phone
“In 2007, five out of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were originally mobile phone novels,” reports Olivia Solon. (In 2008, we published a translated excerpt of one.) Now Movellas has emerged as a new platform for Keitai Shousetu, or literature designed for mobile devices.
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The Essay Crown
Could James Baldwin be America’s greatest essayist? Ta-Nehisi Coates believes so — at The Atlantic, he argues that The Fire Next Time shows Baldwin committing “amazing acts of intellectual and emotional courage.” (Related: Buzz Poole paid tribute to Baldwin back in 2008.)
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Paul Murray on Epic Fail
“‘There’s no success like failure,’ Bob Dylan once sang – but he couldn’t have envisaged the international notoriety that bad art would achieve in the digital age. Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail gleefully hops genres and centuries in a quest to understand our obsession with lameness. Clever, profound, bitingly funny, it’s a brilliant analysis from one of the smartest new critics around.” — Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
The Great Terry Castle
“Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle — incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate,” says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
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Recommended Reading: Jesmyn Ward
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Jesmyn Ward’s new memoir, Men We Reaped. “This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.” Pair with: The New York Times profile of Ward.
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Science Fictions and Realities.
What 2012 looks like, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we are going, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we have been, viewed from the perspective of science reality: Mars.
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From Honey to War
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