At the Paris Review, Adrienne Raphel looks back at Beverly Cleary’s beloved Ramona Quimby series, and notes that the books are riddled with odd discrepancies that are both puzzling and charming. “Ramona taught us how to look for the weirdness in the everyday,” Raphel writes, “and the everyday in the scariest moments. When she wears a particularly gruesome witch costume in Ramona the Pest (the baddest witch in the world!,’ she declares), she begins the day delighted with her anonymity, but ends terrified by the greatest fear of all: no one will know who she is. So, she carries a huge poster with her name on it, presumably beaming under the warty disguise. The mask itself isn’t scary—disappearing, anonymity, being forgotten is what’s most frightening of all.”
Embracing the Mysteries in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby Books
David Foster Wallace Syllabus
The Harry Ransom Center has scanned and uploaded the syllabus from David Foster Wallace‘s Fall 1994 section of English 102: Literary Analysis.
New (Yorker) Murakami
Recommended Reading: “Samsa In Love,” Haruki Murakami’s new fiction in the latest issue of The New Yorker. Bonus: Did you know he translated Jim Fusilli’s 33 1/3 book on Pet Sounds?
Pushed Out of View
Over at The Guardian, Charlotte Jones takes issue with the recently announced sequel of Pride and Prejudice. The book by Terri Fleming will focus on the life of Mary Bennett, a character who is deliberately neglected by Jane Austen. As Jones puts it, “Lizzie only has space in the book for a remarkable interior life because her sisters do not. Even beautiful Jane is a bit insipid – a fact Austen knowingly plays with, as her eventual engagement to Bingley is briefly threatened by Jane’s reticence.”
Or, The Whale
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter
Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”
My Way of Proceeding
New poems from Rae Armantrout are always a cause for celebration. Here are two of them from the Possession issue of Granta Magazine, along with a couple of bonus poems by Caitlin Scarano. Don’t worry, you can thank me later.