At what point do Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the 1990 cinematic classic House Party intersect? Many points, actually, according to this incisive comparison of the two done by Sean Gill for The Offing. If anything, it goes on to prove just how difficult it is to plan a successful party.
Virginia Woolf Meets House Party
A Few More Goodbyes
Hopefully you’ve read Eryn Loeb’s Millions review of Goodbye to All That, a collection of essays by noted writers on the weird sorrow of leaving New York City. Contributors include Dani Shapiro, whom we interviewed back in October, Emma Straub, who wrote an essay for The Millions back in July, and Millions staff writer Emily St. John Mandel. At the LARB, Mason Currey says he dreaded reading the book out of fear that it would raise old anxieties, but then says that his hesitations “quickly evaporated” when he started reading.
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OYC to Print
Selections from Open Yale Courses are headed to print. As program director John Donatich explains, “At first glance, you might look at it skeptically and ask why would anybody pay for something that you can get for free. But on second glance you realize that it’s actually not the same thing at all.”
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Novel Reviews You
Maybe your novel got bad reviews, but at least you weren’t attacked for it. This is the story of Oleg Kashin, a reporter-turned-novelist who was beaten to within an inch of his life for his critiques of the Russian government.
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The Spivet App
Always pushing the envelope in terms of how we think about books, Reif Larsen has just announced an iPad app for his novel The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. As the demo video suggests, this something with much more depth and interaction than just a simple port from print to digital.
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The Fall of “Man”
In The Age of The Crisis of Man, a new book by n + 1 co-founder and editor Mark Greif, the author examines the life and death of the concept of “man,” aka a unified humankind that could be said to suffer from particular conflicts. It was born in the thirties, with the rise of Fascism, but persisted for decades, eventually giving way to a more diversified view of humanity. In Tablet, Adam Kirsch dives into Greif’s arguments.
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Dificil
Growing up, Judy Bolton-Fasman watched her mother study Don Quixote, propping the book up on their kitchen counter while studying for her Master’s in Spanish literature. Her mother was a native speaker, but Cervantes was still a tough writer to figure out, especially if you were reading his work while trying to cook dinner in the background. The author looks back on her mother’s education in a Saturday Essay for The Rumpus.