Every decade or so, writes George Packer in his review of Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, it’s the same old line: “[George] Orwell got it wrong. Things haven’t turned out that bad. The Soviet Union is history. Technology is liberating.” But these arguments miss the point: “Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning.” For The Atlantic, Packer asks what 1984 means in today’s America.
‘1984’ in 2019
Franzen the Fanboy
Every week, we read another article about what Jonathan Franzen hates, but in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Franzen discussed his favorite books. He’s a fan of Harriet the Spy, Gone with the Wind, Childhood’s End, and The Trial.
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Natural Opposition
Recommended Reading: Michele Filgate’s interview with Leslie Jamison, who participated in Year in Reading this year.
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Move It
“These days, nothing says amateur hour quite like an alphabetical bookshelf.” Sloane Crosley does not have packing tips for you, though she does have some book recommendations.
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Not What You Said Before
A couple weeks ago, Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll argued in a Salon piece that David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay about the television and irony back in the early ‘90s, presciently diagnosed the danger of snark in our own age. Now Peter Finocchiaro, a senior editor at Salon, argues instead that we need irony more than we ever have. You could also read A-J Aronstein’s notes from the DFW Symposium.
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“Save Us From Novelists”
“God save us from novelists who want to create role models.” Time Out New York has published a new interview with Eimear McBride, whose award-winning A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was reviewed by our own Hannah Gersen for The Millions.
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John Crow’s Devil
Has the drudgery of submitting poems, stories, and manuscripts ever gotten you down? Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, had his first novel rejected by nearly eighty publishing houses. Here’s a take on self-publishing from The Millions if all of this has got you down.
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