At Bitch Media, Forsyth Harmon discusses her new book, Justine, which casts a careful, thoughtful eye on body image and disordered eating and its effect on the book’s teenage characters. “With this book, I was really looking to observe and record,” Harmon says. “I didn’t want to make a comment on the characters’ behavior as being either bad or good. I’m just doing my best to convey a lived experience in hopes [that] it would make others feel less lonely. That was my striving intention behind the way I approached it in the text and even [with the illustrations].”
Forsyth Harmon on Observing and Recording Without Judgement
Literary T-Shirts from Kafkacotton
The t-shirt team at kafkacotton has generously offered to extend a special deal to readers of The Millions (knowing, I assume, that you bookish folks will dig t-shirts that cleverly proclaim their love for classic books). Use the discount code “THEMILLIONS” to get 10% off. Remember to put the discount code in the “Message to Seller” box. Then, I’m told, you can either immediately pay the full price and they’ll issue you a refund for the discount amount or you can wait for kafkacotton to send you a revised, discounted invoice. Thanks for setting up this deal kafkacotton!
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Stranger Danger
Siglio Press has just come out with a book version of Sophie Calle’s The Address Book, excerpts of which can be seen at The New Yorker.
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Three Reasons To Move Abroad
Let’s take a moment to be jealous of other countries, shall we? In Iceland, “one in ten [residents] will publish something in their lifetime.” Norway’s government “buys 1,000 copies of every book a Norwegian author publishes. It provides a $19,000 annual subsidy to every author.” In Argentina, “the city of Buenos Aires now gives pensions to published writers.”
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The Bard is Back
Shakespeare’s First Folio will leave its heavily guarded vault to tour the U.S. in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death. You could also read our essay on the holiness of Shakespeare.
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The Broken Novel
Literary fiction is falling apart, but it might be for the best, Ted Gioia writes. In his essay, he explores the history of the fragmented novel (or the polyphonic novel as we’ve written about before) from Winesburg, Ohio to A Visit From the Goon Squad and fittingly, he does it in fragments.
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Put on Your Thinking/Dunce Cap
At Slate, David Wolf reviews a new biography of Rene Descartes, who he claims has developed a reputation as the philosophy world’s favorite punching bag.
On The Road With DFW, Part II
At Condalmo, Matthew Tiffany‘s review of David Lipsky’s new book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace: “You can’t go more than two or three pages without Lipsky’s shadow falling over the text. And you aren’t reading this book for the Lipsky, are you? The biggest problem here is that, like it or not, his fingerprints are all over it. And I didn’t like it.”
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