Apologies for the scarcity of posts this week. I was up in Canada for a few days. But without any further ado, a roundup of stuff that has happened in my absence. A new Open Letters for the month of October. Oxford University Press is publishing “As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom from Around […]
Pop over to PBS’s Channel Thirteen website for my recommendations on the new high school reading canon. Feel free to critique my list or offer a book you wish you were assigned in high school. UPDATE: The link to PBS is dead. I’ve reposted the article below. The New Canon John Matthew Fox Selecting reading […]
I’ve been listening to Michael Silverblatt’s interviews with David Foster Wallace for Bookworm, and they are quite rewarding. I especially like that Silverblatt starts out the interview on “Infinite Jest” by asking Wallace straight out whether the structure of the book is based on fractals. (!?) The National Book Foundation highlights five very talented writers […]
The university has taken over the role of Patron of the Arts, especially for creative writing, as the New York Times points out in Those Who Write, Teach. Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a […]
The Bollywood of Lit Mags. Books are Dead (or so they’d like you to think). Edward Champion has catalogued responses from a number of authors on David Foster Wallace’s death. Bilingual short story collection — Spanish and English stories, side by side. Salman Rushdie, editor of this year’s Best American Short Stories, answers two questions […]
I first got the news that David Foster Wallace was dead from a Laila Lalami post on Facebook, and perhaps because it was on Facebook, I instantly went into denial and thought it had to be some kind of sick joke. But it’s not. His wife came home last night to find the 46-year-old Wallace […]
I was there in New York on 9/11, on the 21st story of an apartment building in East Village. Watched them both fall. Looking back at all my writing about the event, I tried so many metaphors to describe the day. People covered in chalky dust like mimes. People streaming over the Brooklyn bridge like […]
Word on the literary street is that Ben Greenman — whose website, oddly enough, resembles a bank’s — is coming out with a new short story collection in October. Correspondences is aptly named: the book includes postcards for reader response and interaction. It’s also a limited edition letterpress, with three accordion books (which starts to […]
Over at the Guardian, there’s a judge from every year since 1969 to talk about the experience of judging the Booker. Here’s the dust-up: No one ever, ever, changes their mind about a book. Even after all the discussion between judges, everyone still hates the novels they hated and loved the novels they loved. As […]
The NY Times argues that experts are more easily mislead than amateurs. Would this apply to literary critics as well? If it does, then it not only applies to the critics who praise hyped books because they’ve been conditioned/influenced by the hype, but it also applies to those who demolish hyped books precisely because they […]
