Posts by author
Jake Slovis
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The Melancholy of Age
For Electric Literature, Henry Stewart examines the coming of age stories of Ray Bradbury. In addition to comparing Bradbury’s “boy’s boys” to characters in works by Mark Twain and James Agee, Stewart draws parallels between Bradbury’s novels and the author’s biography.…
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Harper Lee Debate Rages On
Since the announcement of Harper Lee’s forthcoming novel Go Set a Watchman, residents of Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Alabama, along with the general public, have questioned whether or not publishers are taking advantage of the eighty-eight year old author. Recently, however, Lee’s lawyer Tonja…
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Hornby Keeps It Fresh
For the Atlantic, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviews Nick Hornby about his new book Funny Girl and his experience adapting Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the big screen. While Hornby says he would not consider writing a screenplay based on his own books, adapting other authors’ work…
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Chipotle: The Next New Yorker?
Last year Jonathan Safran Foer teamed up with Chipotle to create a line of cups and to-go bags with short stories by Toni Morrison and George Saunders printed on the side. Now the author is at it again, curating a…
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Re-creations, Adaptations, and “Rip-offs”
Jesus’ Son is often considered the seminal work of Denis Johnson’s career. But recently Johnson called the book a “rip-off” of Isaac Babel’s early 20th century work, Red Cavalry. For The Millions, Nathan Scott McNamara contests Johnson’s assertion, arguing that “rip-off” is not the proper…
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RoboNovelist
Is it conceivable for robots to compete with the “flesh-and-blood novelist?” Over at the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the possibility and the ethical ramifications of algorithms writing the next Anna Karenina. So far, however, Anderson suggests that developers of such technologies have…
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Clothing and Loss
In the fashion world, understanding the zeitgeist is a way of orienting oneself within a temporal framework. And it’s in this way that style is woven so memorably through Didion’s writing. What someone is wearing betrays not just the aesthetic…
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Poe’s Moby-Dick?
For the New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson considers the place of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, within the author’s prolific career. In addition to comparing Pym to other maritime novels, including Moby-Dick, Robinson argues that labeling Poe…
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Pen Pals with Eliot and Marx
For the Tin House blog, Heather Hartley spends the holiday season perusing letters between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx. Through their love of “good cigars” and a “weakness for making puns,” Eliot and Marx show a humorous affection that inspires Hartley to…
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Was Prufrock the First Hipster?
For the Atlantic, Karen Swallow Prior puts a new spin on the origin story of the “hipster,” arguing that T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock was actually one of the first: Prufrock of the cuffed white flannel trousers cultivates a detached earnestness that…
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Science Fiction’s Diversity Makeover
For the Guardian, Damien Walter applauds the growing diversity of science fiction titles in 2014, particularly the work of Kameron Hurley and Anne Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice. Of Leckie’s work Walter writes: Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make…
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Facebook: New Platform for Extremist Death Threats
Shortly after Kamel Daoud’s Counter-Investigation fell short of winning the Goncourt Prize, the Algerian author received a Facebook death threat from an Islamist preacher calling the author “an enemy of religion.” Now, Daoud fights to defend his work as extremists attempt to force him…