For The New Yorker, Jill Lepore brings a critical eye to the memoirs of 2020’s Democratic presidential candidates, comparing the lyricism and romance of Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home to the force and anger of Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight to the less inspired liberal-cum-Republican coming-of-age narrative in Ronald Reagan’s Where’s the Rest of Me? “Most of the books,” Lepore notes, “are not great books, and some of these people just don’t seem like good people. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make good Presidents, I guess, but it raises a question: Why do they write this stuff?” What are political autobiographies really for?
Democrats and the Written Word
Kim Lit
This week has been full of news about unorthodox children’s book authors. First, there was Keith Richards’s picture book, and now an Australian academic claims that Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung wrote children’s books, too. “I was astounded that children’s books (purportedly) written by Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung were vastly more readable than one would expect from any political leader in the democratic west, still less a severe authoritarian,” doctoral student Christopher Richardson said.
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Custodian of Forgotten Books
Recommended Reading: On Brad Bigelow, a “Custodian of Forgotten Books.” Our own Claire Cameron traces the history of John Williams’s Stoner, which was first published in 1965 and became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2013.
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On the Rise of the Mass Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia has been growing larger and more democratic for hundreds of years, but the spread of today’s mass intelligentsia “is arguably happening on a far larger scale,” writes Philosophy For Life author Jules Evans.
New Octavia Butler
When Octavia Butler died in 2006, she left behind unseen short stories. Butler’s agent has discovered two unpublished stories in the author’s papers. “A Necessary Being” features a lonely alien leader, and “Childminder” is about mentoring telepaths. The two stories will be published this summer in the collection Unexpected Stories.
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These narrators are conspicuously powerless
Over at Prospect, Leo Benedictus takes a look into the subversive “hindered narrators” in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Room, and Pigeon English.
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