At Time, Morgan Jerkins discusses her new novel, Caul Baby, a story set in Harlem that has elements of both the fantastical and the familiar. “I think it’s helpful to work on fiction in the pandemic, because I want to escape,” Jerkins says. “I want my mind to run free as it can—and a lot of times that stretches right into the fantastic, right into the surreal.”
Morgan Jerkins on Letting Your Mind Run to the Surreal
The Perils of Litchat
“Like all great literature, [David Foster Wallace’s] books do many things at once. Litchat, however, is singleminded.” Laura Miller discusses “the perils of litchat” at The New Yorker and how it has affected the legacy of David Foster Wallace. For less litchat, read our review of The David Foster Wallace Reader.
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Only Sounds
“The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting to give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is.” This excerpt from John Cage’s journals, forthcoming as Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), is as baffling as it is beautiful.
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To Antarctica We Go
Recommended Reading: Chris Jones went to Antarctica, and on the way he started believing in ghosts.
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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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