In all the understandable uproar about the impending disembowelment of the literary magazine TriQuarterly, I haven’t yet seen a suggestion that readers and writers try to do something about the situation.

And so, after a minute of crack sleuthing, I’ve discovered an address to which one can write to ask Northwestern University to reconsider their decision to get rid of TriQuarterly’s editorial board (after the jump). …more

Sometimes, reading can feel like being on a roller-coaster–one of the classically vertiginous stomach-hurtling superstructures, like Coney Island’s Cyclone, say–but, of course, better.

“High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life” by Brian Christian, an essay in the latest issue of AGNI, made me giddy with the thrill of following the writer’s logical freefalls from chaos to probability to predictability to the problem with text autofill technology to why it is that small talk might make you want to kill yourself.

This particular essay is available only on paper, so you should go buy a copy of the consistently excellent AGNI at your nearest bookstore. In the meantime, you can read other essays by Christian online here and here.

There’s a sizable new interview with James Wood, polemical literary critic extraordinaire, up on LA Weekly. Colson Whitehead has spoofed him, Walter Kirn has mocked him, and there’s even a blog devoted solely to contradicting him–if you don’t already read him (in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere), it’s a good place to begin; if you do, well, here it is.

I’ve been living in the Bay Area for nine months now, but after years in New York City I still feel like an exile here. Strangers’ smiles unnerve me; hikes, sadly, bore; driving terrifies. To ease the sense of displacement, however, there is the godsend that is The Threepenny Review, the quarterly literary magazine published in Berkeley. Among the miscellany of pleasures in its most recent issue, there is a story by Wendell Berry that stands as one of the finest and funniest short stories I have read in some time. “Andy Catlett: Early Education” begins in ill-fated idyll (“In grades one and two I was a sweet, tractable child who caused no trouble”) and ends in remedy; every deadpanning word, meanwhile, delights. …more

Sometimes I separate the books I intend, one day, to read, into two groups: the Bookcase of Desire, and the Bookcase of Guilt. Desire is made up of anticipated pleasures, the books I haven’t yet read only because time is cruel and limited: Bernard Malamud’s novels, for example, and Jude the Obscure, and Alice Munro’s most recent collection. Guilt, on the other hand, is crammed with the books I know I ought to read. …more

This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the thirty-minute interview is posted in its entirety. They talk of religion, The New Yorker, sex, the Apostles’ Creed, the suburbs, and, of course, each other’s work. Watch for Updike’s smile when the senior Cheever says that Rabbit is Rich is the most exciting novel he’s read “in a great many years,” and listen for Cheever’s magnificent voice.

If I have learned anything from years of recommending this book, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing. …more