jonathan franzen
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The President’s Holiday Reading List
Electric Literature has the scoop on the list of books President Obama and his family bought during their recent excursion on Small Business Saturday. Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Franzen made their way onto the President’s reading list.
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Nearer to Nonsense
If “show, don’t tell” were really that great advice, why bother writing anything at all? Slate’s Forrest Wickman makes the case for saying what you mean: Twenty-first-century tastemakers like to think of themselves as beyond highbrow vs. lowbrow—that monocle popped…
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Justifying the Template
Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? At the…
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The Fiction of Work
Most work is not fulfilling, and by the time we finally realize it all the friends we’d like to turn to for support have been scattered across the globe in pursuit of fulfilling work. At Ploughshares, Tim Ellison looks at…
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Neil Gaiman Versus China
The Guardian reports that Neil Gaiman has added his name to a letter urging China’s president Xi Jinping to release dissident writers “languishing in jail for the crime of expressing their opinions.” In addition to Gaiman, several other famed authors, including Jonathan Franzen and…
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Notable NYC: 9/19–9/25
Saturday 9/19: Jami Attenberg, Lauren Groff, Alice Sola Kim, Sara Novic, Chinelo Okparanta, and Julia Pierpont join Mellow Pages Library Summer Vacation for a blowout bookend event. Silent Barn, 2 p.m., Free. Marie Buck, Laura Elrick, Luke McMullan, and Rachel…
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Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
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Liberty, Justice
From Freedom to Purity, there’s no denying the man likes his themes. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon reviews Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming novel: Does Franzen truly believe his readers need to hear that the world is impure? For another take on Purity,…
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The Rumpus Interview with Etgar Keret
Writer Etgar Keret talks about his new memoir The Seven Good Years, the early criticism he faced as a writer, and the surreal that is always waiting.
