I initially resisted Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories, a website on which a different piece of short fiction will be posted every week for a year because it is first and foremost a marketing tool. Since last week’s post, though, of “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” by Peter Wild, en suite of Willa Cather’s “The Sculpter’s Funeral,” I’ve abandoned, if only for the moment, such righteousness in favor of real admiration. As an increasingly peripheral writer – and more personally, my […]
Even Sontag Was 13 Years Old Once
Anne K. Yoder of The Millions blog recently reviewed Susan Sontag’s early journals, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963. I haven’t had a chance to pick up the book yet, but Yoder’s review, entitled “The Girl’s Guide to Becoming an Intellectual”, obligingly distills Sontag’s entries into seven helpful doctrines: read and live voraciously; cultivate your ego; keep a journal; “all the world’s a stage”; make time for good sex; betray others but be true to yourself. Before becoming the mythic intellectual […]
The Fatwa’s Forgotten
This past Saturday marked, besides St. Hallmark’s Day, the 20th anniversary of the Rushdie affair during which Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the most famous modern-day literary death sentence, a fatwa upon the head of British writer Salman Rushdie for his allegedly blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini’s issuance of the fatwa was a turning point for the Western world in terms of free speech and the possible impact of art derived from post-colonial democracies. The order for the life of […]
The Arrival of Kindle 2.0
The digital age of literature is being hurled at us with momentous force. Within two weeks, Washington Post’s Book World book review went online-only and a new, significantly improved, Amazon Kindle was unveiled yesterday. According to Business Week , Kindle 2.0 is aimed at students. Seeing as it is 25% thinner than the iPhone and far sleeker than the previous model, I imagine the temptation of slipping one of these into your backpack in place of the seriously sizable “Anthology […]
Pride, Prejudice, and Satire
I first got word of Seth Grahame-Smith’s upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by way of the zombie horror genre “with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action” a few weeks ago. I squinted my eyes, considering. Ultimately, I ignored it, I moved on. But since blog posts and news articles about this novel have been relentlessly appearing in my Google Reader, it seems others are not doing the same. So, a zombie […]
Far Below Moscow, the Burden of Free Will
It’s fitting that Russia’s newest railway addition, an homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky, will be built 60 meters below the city where the writer was born, making it one of the deepest in Moscow. “[Dostoevsky] cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive–the human soul,” wrote Virginia Woolf on the Russian romantic (The Common Reader). And what could be more alienating–not to mention thematically faithful to Dostoevskian paradigms–than a railway station deeper and darker than […]
The “Death” of Book World
I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t care about the impending death of print media. Once in awhile, out of casual guilt, I try to scan one of the multifarious articles on the subject but usually I only make it halfway through. More often than not, I just skip them altogether. And now, as the Washington Post’s printed Book World kicks it, the debate refuels: is High Culture on the demise? The screams of terror sound anew and […]
Indulging in Literary Spirits
What’s with various print media developing food and drink equivalents to literary writers, books, and characters? New Yorker’s The Book Bench and The Guardian’s BooksBlog do it. Every week, Lit Spirits, a weekly feature for Book Bench, employs their “resident mixologist” to “pair cocktails with characters from literature.” And the Guardian, similarly, has actively engaged commenters in a debate as to what type of coffee Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk would be. The idea is astonishingly frivolous […]