Page2RRS

• 24 May ' 05:03

  Critic and historian Paul Fussell, author of the the award-winning WWI study The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, the New York Times reports.

  The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is online, and we have very mixed feelings about it. But if you’re into the idea of a Leonardo DiCaprio-starring, Kanye West-soundtracked take on Fitzgerald—which is also shot in 3-D—this is probably for you. In other adaptation news, New

  The Loves of Lena Dunham

  Elaine Blair

  The New York Review of Books

  There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham's HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I'm going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that most critics have mentioned and described with some amount of repugnance or lament.

  

  Utopia and Dystopia: Geographies of the Possible

  • 
    The Cows by Lydia Davis

    Electric Lit's animation of a single sentence from Lydia Davis's recent chapbook, The Cows, by artist Donna K.
  • 
    Deborah Eisenberg reading at the University of Richmond

    Ben Marcus has called MacArthur "genius" grant winner Deborah Eisenberg "one of the most important fiction writers now at work." Here she is reading "Some Other Better Otto," a story featuring a "very very irritable person at the best of times" who is in a "particularly horrible mood right now."
  • 
    The On the Road App

    A new edition of Jack Kerouac's classic novel, On the Road, jazzed-up for the app age.

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• 23 May ' 20:13

  Confronting conservatives

  

  From Humanitas, Walter A. McDougall (Penn): The Challenge Confronting Conservatives: Sustaining a Republic of Hustlers (and responses by Michael P. Federici and Richard M. Gamble and a reply). Cosimo Magazzino (Roma Tre): The Economic Policy of Ronald Reagan: Between Supply-Side and Keynesianism. Landon Schnabel (Andrews): Whatever Happened to the Christian Coalition? A Sociohistorical Content Analysis of the Contract with the American Family and the Republican Party Platform. Ed Kilgore on

  

  The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

  • 
    Lytle Shaw reading at Berkeley

    Lytle Shaw, a poet and Artforum contributor whose books include Low Level Bureaucratic Structures and The Lobe Roof—reads his work.
  • 
    Amelia Gray reads from "Threats"

    "Try to kiss me—see what happens to your lips!" In a video by Angeline Gragasin and Susan Yi, Amelia Gray reads from her forthcoming Threats while riding on a moped in L.A.

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• 23 May ' 09:14

  How things went so wrong

  

  

  of Public Diplomacy is out. Kaarina Maatta and Satu Uusiautti (Lapland): Love and Play: Are They the Same? From Cato Journal, a special issue on monetary reform in the wake of crisis. Oprah Winfrey and OWN on the Ropes: Chicago's former media queen is struggling to save the network that bears her name — how things went so wrong and how Oprah is handling the career challenge of her life. PC Wars Redux: Why are millennials re-litigating the political correctness fights of the 90s?

  

  Junot Díaz

  • 
    The Broken Word by Adam Foulds

    The Broken Word is a delicate and powerful poetic sequence that charts a young man's progress through a dark period in British colonial history—the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya.
  • 
    The Next Decade in Book Culture

    From the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature: A conversation about the new power of the book review and the emergence of a unique reader experience in the age of the digital revolution, featuring Morris Dickstein, Carsten Jensen, Cynthia Ozick, and Hervé Le Tellier; moderated by Jane Ciabattari.
  • 
    An Interview with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

    Journalist Sheryl McCarthy chats with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto about her memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, in which the author talks with people who survived the atomic attacks.

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• 22 May ' 21:22

  The fortunes of Africa

  

  A new issue of The Journal of Pan African Studies is out. A new issue of Africa Review of Books is out. Ethel E. Idialu (Ambrose Alli): The Inhuman Treatment of Widows in African Communities. From Inkanyiso, L.E. Mayoyo, P.J. Potgieter, and J.M. Ras (Zululand): Fear of Crime and the Role of the Police. "In 10 years' time, Ghana may not require any aid at all": Ghana is one of Africa's great successes. A revolution deferred: So why did Kinshasa not have its Tahrir moment? How to defuse sub-Saharan

  More than ten million copies of Fifty Shades of Gray have been sold in the U.S. since it went on sale six weeks ago.

  One reason why it’s so difficult to predict literary longevity is because of the “high-school popularity problem,” Tom Vanderbilt theorizes, noting that the qualities that make people popular in high school (or the literary world) like being the “radiant prom king, adorned with varsity letters” don’t translate into

  The Yankee Comandante

  David Grann

  The New Yorker

  For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with

  06/20

  86th and Lex Reading Group

  

  Dale Peck interviews Abdellah Taïa

  • 
    Room by Emma Donaghue

    Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
  • 
    "Jersey Shore" as written by Oscar Wilde

    What if the characters of Broadway's "The Importance of Being Earnest" traveled through a time warp and woke up on the beach with Snooki, The Situation and the rest of the gang of MTV's "Jersey Shore"? In an video series created for Playbill by "Earnest" stars Santino Fontana and David Furr, the Roundabout Theatre Company cast puts "Jersey" in the mouths of Oscar Wilde's famed Britons.
  • 
    Us by Michael Kimball

    Luca Dipierro's beautiful and heartbreaking animation — based on a single sentence from Michael Kimball's novel, Us

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• 22 May ' 10:42

  Waiting for the wisdom

  

  

  Steffen Bohm and Chris Land (Essex) and Armin Beverungen (Leuphana): The Value of Marx: Free Labour, Rent and “Primitive” Accumulation in Facebook. From Chronicles, should speculative bankers be put to death? Srdja Trifkovic wonders. Want to end partisan politics? Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein on what won’t work — and what will. Joshua E. Keating on the 10 TED Talks they should have censored. Godwin alert: Liberals have been screaming “conspiracy theory” for so long that they can’t

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed for bankruptcy in order to restructure 3.1 billion in debt. But HMH has plenty of plans for the future: For one, it will publish Amazon's new imprint under the New Harvest title.

  Tonight at the New School, Eric Banks joins Charles Petersen, Joan Wallach Scott, David Nasaw, Mark Alan Hewitt, and others to discuss the controversial “Central Library Plan” and the future of the New York Public Library

  A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Ruth Franklin

  current issue

  

  Lillian Hellman was once a star. She was one of the most successful playwrights of her time, with her first produced work, The Children's Hour, running for two years on Broadway. As a screenwriter in the 1930s, she earned the top rate of $2,500 a week to write two films

  • 
    Lillian Hellman was once a star. She was one of the most successful playwrights of …

  

  

  

  

  

  Authors and Audiences

  • 
    CAConrad reads in a bathtub

    Readings can take place in a lot of places—bookstores, bars. Or, as this video of CAConrad proves, a bathtub. Here, the author of the excellent The Book of Frank introduces a poem by saying: "I was finding a lot of crow feathers. And I had this dream that I gave birth to a little baby.... It was a little cake baby. And I gave it to the crows and the crows loved it, and it made me really happy." Happy Poetry Month!
  • 
    An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

    A classic 1950s CBC television interview with Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discussing Lolita: "We can't trust a creative writer to say what he has done."
  • 
    The Instructions by Adam Levin

    Adam Levin's debut novel, The Instructions, is a 1,000-plus page chronicle narrated by a ten-year old kid who may just be the Jewish Messiah. Here, he creates a deadly weapon out of common household objects.

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• 21 May ' 22:58

  New York

  06/18

  Samuel R. Delany With Kenneth James — Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  • 
    Cathy Park Hong’s poetry can be dark, depressing, grimly prophetic, and fun—often …

  Aleksandar Hemon and Stuart Dybek discuss Chicago

  • 
    A Next-generation Digital Book

    From TED 2011, Mike Matas demonstrates the first full-length interactive book for the iPad—with clever, swipeable video and graphics, and some cool data visualizations.
  • 
    Salman Rushdie and Carsten Jensen

    Salman Rushdie in conversation with Danish author Carsten Jensen about Rushdie's novel The Enchantress of Florence.
  • 
    Utopia and Dystopia: Geographies of the Possible

    Authors Inga Kuznetsova, Jonathan Lethem, Eshkol Nevo, and Andrzej Stasiuk discuss the best—and worst—of all possible worlds; moderated by Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio.

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• 21 May ' 12:06

  Is math still relevant?

  

  Anca Croitoru (UAIC): The Informal Side of Mathematics. In a top-secret program, talented, young female mathematicians calculated the artillery and bomb trajectories that American GIs used to win World War II. A review of Math for Life: Crucial Ideas You Didn't Learn in School by Jeffrey Bennett. David McConnell recoiled from maths as a child, but came to love its beauty — as did prisoners in one of America’s toughest jails. A review of Taking Sudoku Seriously: The Math behind the World's Most

  When HHhHtranslator Sam Taylor moved to France eleven years ago, he spoke no French, but decided to learn it and become a literary translator in order to supplement his income as a novelist.

  Newly minted New Republic owner Chris Hughes has lured former editor Franklin Foer back to edit the magazine. Foer ran the magazine for five years until leaving in 2010. In an interview on Thursday, Hughes told the New York Times that he plans to double the

  Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks

  John Domini

  web exclusive

  

  Boarded Windows must be appreciated as one of those debut novels that strike their own dizzy balance. It's a rock'n'roll story couched in Proustian delicacy, a Beat reconfiguring of the family that moves towards pomo deconstruction of any reliable relationship—and

  

  The Snowman

  • 
    Colson Whitehead on Sag Harbor

    Colson Whitehead, a self-proclaimed "child of the '80s," strolls through Sag Harbor, the Long Island town that served as the setting for his autobiographical novel of the same name. "I never liked The Catcher in the Rye. I feel like if you'd just give him some Prozac or an Xbox it would have been a much shorter book."
  • 
    Lytle Shaw reading at Berkeley

    Lytle Shaw, a poet and Artforum contributor whose books include Low Level Bureaucratic StructuresThe Lobe Roof—reads his work.
  • 
    Mildred Pierce: The HBO Miniseries

    A trailer for Todd Hayne's HBO series starring Kate Blanchett. The script, which Haynes cowrote with author Jon Raymond, maintains a stunning faithfulness to the James M. Cain novel on which it's based.

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• 20 May ' 18:53

  Brooklyn

  

  Tweets from Tahrir edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns

  • 
    Decoded by Jay-Z

    In his book Decoded, rapper Jay-Z provides autobiographical and sociological context for his lyrics, explaining them in depth. In this video, he discusses his song "Most Kingz," based on a phrase in a Basquiat painting.
  • 
    In the Plex

    What does Google know about you? Steven Levy, author of In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives explains.
  • 
    Tom McCarthy: In Praise of Georg Trakl

    Tom McCarthy's novel C takes place in the early 20th century and is rife with allusions, radio signals, war, drugs addict, and secrets. Here, he talks about his "new favorite author," the early-20th-century German poet Georg Trakl, a drug addict and doctor during World War I. Says McCarthy: "His whole world is polluted and toxic."

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• 20 May ' 08:23

  

  Authors@Google: James Gleick

  • 
    Luc Sante on Folk Photography

    Writer and critic Luc Sante explains how he started collecting postcards thirty years ago and reads the introduction to his book, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905–1930
  • 
    Mary Gaitskill reads "Lost Cat"

    Mary Gaitskill dwells on love and pain, humans and pets, in this story about a stray cat. "Many people, perhaps most, would consider my feelings neurotic, a projection onto an animal of my own loneliness and fear."
  • 
    The Instructions by Adam Levin

    Adam Levin's debut novel, The Instructions, is a 1,000-plus page chronicle narrated by a ten-year old kid who may just be the Jewish Messiah. Here, he creates a deadly weapon out of common household objects.

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• 19 May ' 21:04

  • 
    Cathy Park Hong’s poetry can be dark, depressing, grimly prophetic, and fun—often …

  

  Kristin Hersh

  • 
    Jaimy Gordon reads from Lord of Misrule

    National Book Award-winner in fiction Jaimy Gordon reads from her racetrack novel Lord of Misrule at the 2010 National Book Awards finalists event.
  • 
    Ian McEwan talks about the Jerusalem Prize

    Ian McEwan and publisher Nan A. Talese discuss his controversial decision to accept the Jerusalem Prize.

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