Publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards spilled the beans on Twitter Thursday night: Lorrie Moore has a new short fiction collection in the pipeline. It’s slated for March 2014 release.
Selected Shorts: What Would You Do? (Feat. David Sedaris) -
Recommended Listening: David Sedaris presented three short stories while guest hosting WNYC’s Selected Shorts. The three stories were written by Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, and Frank Gannon, and each one has to do with “hard choices,” says Sedaris.
Porn Studies is a new academic journal focused on “cultural products and services designated as pornographic.” Have fun asking your librarian for this one.
Families and their groceries from around the world.
From White Russians to Old Fashioneds: cocktails in literature and film.
It’s all fun and games until you cast Vincent Kartheiser as Mr. Darcy.
“What [Vladimir] Nabokov is actually doing in Lolita is deliberately drawing on all manner of anti-Semitic propaganda, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nazi caricatures of the Jewish ‘type,’ to create in Humbert Humbert the anti-Semitic cliché of legend, rather as, say, Chaucer draws on medieval misogynist writings to create in the figure of the Wife of Bath the archetypal shrew of his male audience’s nightmares.” — Is Humbert Humbert Jewish? by Mark Ford
“I spoke to Poggioli about you, at Harvard. He would like to have you there for six months or a year, and this is an opportunity you should not refuse. Even though Harvard is not America, but a kind of Olympus containing the intellectual cream from all over the world, you would have the chance to see a bit of America traveling around. And one should not let slip any chances of “talking” to the Americans, of doing something to bridge this abyss which divides us, and it really is an abyss: this is a different world, as far from Europe and our problems as the Moon.” — To prepare us for the release of Italo Calvino’s letters, the editors at Page-Turner are running excerpts from the book. In their latest installment — following their first two — Calvino describes New York City, which “swallowed [him] up like a carnivorous plant.”
A theory of place in literature derived from Parks and Recreation? Why, Ploughshares blog, you’re too kind.