Literary & Media Indulgences: 8/18/2013

-- John Cheever on trial at Sing Sing. I swear, this writer shows me more and more ways to open me up.

-- Salvador Dalí's rare and beautiful illustrations of Montaigne’s essays. Published 1947.

-- Science Fiction and Prophecy: Arthur C. Clarke interviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

-- "Vassar, Unzipped." In Vanity Fair, Laura Jacobs writes brilliantly about Mary McCarthy's The Group, fifty years after its publication. The Group is one of the strangest and most fascinating novels I've ever read. I actually wanted to write an essay hooked to its fiftieth birthday, but then I read this piece by Jacobs, and thought, welp, she's done just about exactly what I would've hoped to have done.

-- Speaking of literary birthdays: The New Yorker takes a look at "Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, at Twenty."

-- Here's what Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster thought of Jane Austen's fiction.

-- Albert Camus and empire.

-- On witches, Paris, and the bewitching: Toby Barlow and Rosecrans Baldwin talk it up.

-- Teju Cole hangs out with  Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka at his home in Abeokuta, Nigeria.

-- "Nancy Drew and the Case of the Lazy Child Reader."

-- NPR on how Scholastic came to pitch literacy (and bookish joy, as my memory holds it) to generations of children.

-- I adore the poetry of Maurice Manning, its mix of magic and voice and nature. His interview with the Poetry Foundation is worth your time. Worth it!

-- "All students—and I mean all—ought to think seriously about majoring in English." Mark Edmundson writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

-- Novelist Nadeem Aslam learned English by copying out Moby-Dick.

-- Two translators talk over at Bookslut about, among other things, pet peeves.

--On the rise of beer-drinking, and its discontents, in Africa. (For the record, I dug the ubiquitous Tuskers, as well as the porter at Brew Bistro in Nairobi.)

-- The "best books on Kenya," according to The Guardian.

-- Watching Like a Girl: I can relate to a great deal of what Stacey Mae Fowles writes about being both a sports fan and female.

-- SBNation on the "death of a ballplayer" -- Billy Dillon, the woulda-been Detroit Tiger who instead spent 27 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

-- "The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia."

-- Underwritten or undercut? The Columbia Journalism Review on how to solve our foreign coverage problem. (Spoiler: Non-profit funding isn't it.)

-- In Harper's: Rebecca Solnit talks about "how personal stories can fail to satisfy, the architectural space of the book, and the pleasures with which the landscapes of our lives are salted."

-- Ariel Levy in The New Yorker on what amounts to 13 ways of looking at justice in Steubenville.

-- Bill Moyers and Marshall Ganz talking about making social movements matter.

-- This is what happens when you buy a 91-acre island in the Great Lakes, and give it over to artists and writers. (h/t Chris M.)

-- Genderqueer comics of Middle America: an interview with Rhea Ewing of FINE.

-- Beyond the Moomins: A look at Tove Jansson's gorgeous writing for adults, ahead of the Jansson centenary that looms in 2014.

-- Whose Review of Books?

-- Rachel Kushner, interviewed, over at The Rumpus.

-- The always-provoking Tim Parks on Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov, and writing to death.

-- Words Without Borders is featuring literary Brazil this month.

-- Nina Sabolik makes a case for why Ismail Kadare should win the next Nobel Prize in literature.

-- California's otherwordly place in science fiction.

 

Image credit: The New Yorker

Comments

[Mike Lindgren]

Holy cow! I think you read and write more by breakfast than I do in a whole week! Terrific stuff! (And let's go Tigers!)

[Anna Clark]

Haha! Well, let's just say that this Indulgences feature was meant to be a weekly feature and it has turned out to be ... on a less frequent schedule.