At Guernica, Garth Greenwell discusses his new book, Cleanness, which shares a narrator with his debut, What Belongs to You. “I think it’s an assumption on my part about human beings: that we don’t know ourselves, that we are much more mysteries to ourselves than we are clear, and that someone who feels they are not a mystery to themselves is deluded,” Greenwell says. “It always seems to me that there’s a great deal of ourselves we don’t know, and that we don’t want to know. One of the things that interests me about narrative, and about having the same narrator over two books, is the possibility that presents of repeatedly putting this person in situations where he undergoes a process of coming into self-knowledge and is forced to look at things he’d prefer not to look at and to discover things that maybe he would prefer not to know, or things that frighten him.”
Garth Greenwell on Being a Mystery to Yourself
Perry’s “Oops”
“Oops is everything that Perry could not do if he still wanted to be President.” What you missed while not watching last night’s Republican Debate in Detroit.
“The Percy Jackson Problem”
“Riordan’s books prompt an uneasy interrogation of the premise underlying the ‘so long as they’re reading’ side of the debate—at least among those of us who want to share Neil Gaiman’s optimistic view that all reading is good reading, and yet find ourselves by disposition closer to the Tim Parks end of the spectrum, worried that those books on our children’s shelves that offer easy gratification are crowding out the different pleasures that may be offered by less grabby volumes.” In an essay for The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead considers questions about what children should be reading through the lens of the Percy Jackson series.
“A great novel is always felt as a kind of gift”
Millions contributor Brian Ted Jones read through some of Nic Pizzolatto’s written fiction – such as his novel, Galveston – and found that the author dwelled on many of the “same obsessions” as he does in his breakout HBO hit, True Detective.
Smuggling Ulysses
Ulysses: The one book that publishers (and Joyce himself) desperately wanted to be confiscated – all in an effort to confront censorship, of course. Mental Floss has the full story.