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Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work
"There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged. Sales of hardcover young-adult books are up 30.7% so far this year, through June, according to the Association of American Publishers, while adult hardcovers are down 17.8%. Nam Le's "The Boat," one of the best-reviewed books of fiction of 2008, has sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and trade paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan (which admittedly doesn't include all book retailers). In the first quarter of 2009 alone, the author of the "Twilight" series, Stephenie Meyer, sold eight million books. What are those readers looking for? You'll find critics who say they have bad taste, or that they're lazy and can't hack it in the big leagues. But that's not the case. They need something they're not getting elsewhere. Let's be honest: Why do so many adults read Suzanne Collins's young-adult novel "The Hunger Games" instead of contemporary literary fiction? Because "The Hunger Games" doesn't bore them. "
Cogito ergo sum, baby | Salon
"Toddlers have amazing philosophical minds that work like computers and can teach us a world about ourselves" - fascinating (looking) new book by Alison Gopnik "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life"
Power Moby-Dick, the Online Annotation — Chapter 1
Interesting project in online annotation. It's getting to be time to read Moby Dick again. via @jstein
sp!ked review of books | It’s time to move beyond the nature/nurture divide
Sadly, since The Nurture Assumption was first published 10 years ago, the cultural preoccupation with protecting children from any possible negative messages has extended far beyond the confines of the home to include what goes on in the classroom and the school playground, too.
Against Readings - Mark Edmundson
If you are interested in reading, literature and criticism-- this is a must-read.
LRB · James Wood: James Wood writes about the manipulations of Ian McEwan
"And indeed, knowing what readers want is at the heart of the diabolical success of this book. What is especially interesting about Atonement in the light of McEwan’s status as a popular but serious manipulator, is the delicate way it makes readers aware of their own desire to be gratified by serious narrative manipulation." -- James Wood is a frustrating, but brilliant critic!
Notes on Conceptual Fiction by Ted Gioia
Is it possible that this
trend is reversing, and that conceptual fiction is now moving back
from the periphery into the center of our literary culture?
The Bible's Literary Merits - ChronicleReview.com
What makes Wood's mischaracterization of biblical narrative so disappointing is the opportunity that is lost, the opportunity to have one of our best and most subtle analysts of fictional narrative go to work on our most ancient example of fictional narrative. For whatever else the Bible is or contains — scripture, ethics, history, lyric poetry — it also represents a genuine precursor to the modern novel.
Snark Attack: The New Yorker's David Denby campaigns against "low, teasing, snide, condescending" criticism - Reason Magazine
Anyone who has been exposed to the subliterate animosities and grudges of the cruder anonymous commenters or bloggers, or has bristled at the lowered bar of what passes as clever satire on snark-heavy websites, will have some sympathy for Denby's effort to attack against the “everyone-sucks-but-me” culture. But his bizarre choice of targets and imprecise definition of “snarky” derails his argument from the beginning.
'An Oresteia,' Translated by Anne Carson - Review
As in, the Watchman saying: "Gods! Free me from this grind!"
From Shtetl to Château - The New York Review of Books
"Jackie Wullschlager's substantial biography draws on a wealth of unpublished letters still in the possession of his descendants to tell the story of Chagall's journey from shtetl to château. But not for an instant did it convince me that Chagall was a great or even an important artist."
Reconsideration: Lolita (Francine Prose)
Among the qualities—beauty, intelligence, grace, complexity, facility of language, wit, among countless other literary virtues—that distinguishes Lolita as a work of art is the fact that it functions as the opposite of and the antidote to programs like To Catch a Predator. Lolita deepens our well of compassion and sympathy, whether we like it or not.
The "I Can Read Movies" Series - a set on Flickr
Sweet graphic look for this series. via @courosa
From Evolution Comes Literature - Forbes.com
'Literature and its oral antecedents are thus part of the basic profile of "human nature." Over the past 15 years or so, literary scholars in a small but now rapidly growing group have argued that producing an adequate theory of literature requires an evolutionary conception of human nature. By assimilating evolutionary social science, these "literary Darwinists" aim to form a new paradigm for the study of literature.'
Mister Lucky
"Gladwell is rather a slippery writer; he does not make philosophical commitments. Some people who read Outliers may argue that he gives too little credit to individual resilience. Others may contend that he manages to find a near-perfect balance in weighing the internal and the external. What almost no one would dispute is the boring truism that both factors play tremendous roles in shaping the life of every individual. Maybe the Bush years have left common sense looking like dissidence, but common sense is the most that the outlier Malcolm Gladwell has, in the best of circumstances, to offer. Even when his thinking is right, it is weak."
An Alienation Artist: Kafka and His Critics
The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the level of the aphorism.
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