Salinger never wanted or needed me to stick up for him.
Kristopher Jansma on secrets, stories, and J.D. Salinger.
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
“Saying that Susan Sontag belongs to “the photography police” is hitting below the belt. It was only after I finished reading Believing Is Seeing and went back to Sontag’s writings on photography that I began to see that Errol Morris, this dogged seeker of truth, had been less than fully truthful.”
Bill Morris, reviewing Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing.
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
Spurred by a sudden and quixotic interest in what constitutes genre, I developed my own little highly-nonscientific experiment. I went to the local library and checked out three books in each of seven genres. I didn’t worry too much about the academics – if the library called a book sci-fi or fantasy, I took their word for it. I dragged the twenty-one books home and devoted an entire rainy weekend to going through them, looking for tropes or devices that separated one genre from another.
Kim Wright, “The Genre Games.”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
To my mind, Harold Bloom is not so much the judicious patriarch or brazen egomaniac or even a vogon (as one detractor had it) as he is a grandmother – endlessly harried, fiercely loving, and relentlessly worried about the future of his brood. One could say that the bombastic Brontosaurus is really no more than the mother hen of his corner of literary history. He has been known to address his interviewers as “my child,” “my dearies,” and “my little bear.” Every photo of him I’ve ever seen displays the hollow-eyed gaze of a sort of maternal weariness, an insomnia of wondering if the lights are going out and if the house will still be standing when he finally shuffles off the mortal coil.
Matt Hanson’s review of Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
![Smith’s avant-garde is a gradual convergence on what she insists doesn’t exist: the one true and transcendent Real. But look at the “disturb and disrupt” mandate I sketched above—hell, look at Smith’s essay—and you’ll instantly see that avant-gardism, like its dark twin kitsch, is always situational. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Wagner’s innovations are disruptive; by the mid-Twentieth, they’re the soundtrack for Triumph of the Will.
—Garth Risk Halberg, “How Avant Is It? Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and the Novel’s Way Forward”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
[Image]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx18auOyGp1r6xvfko1_1280.jpg)
Smith’s avant-garde is a gradual convergence on what she insists doesn’t exist: the one true and transcendent Real. But look at the “disturb and disrupt” mandate I sketched above—hell, look at Smith’s essay—and you’ll instantly see that avant-gardism, like its dark twin kitsch, is always situational. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, Wagner’s innovations are disruptive; by the mid-Twentieth, they’re the soundtrack for Triumph of the Will.
—Garth Risk Halberg, “How Avant Is It? Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, and the Novel’s Way Forward”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
[Image]
Source: themillions.com
In the male hegemony of publishing, us gals are supposed to stick together. Which is all well and good, in theory. But to suggest that a woman writer should not be critical of other women writers is counter to progress. It reminds me a little bit of the 2008 election. There was a certain kind of Hillary supporter that believed all women should be in support of our potential first woman president mostly on the basis that this could be our first woman president! Which is all well and good, in theory. But to express any sort of dissent guaranteed you a look of pity mingled with disgust: Poor thing. She must secretly hate her vagina.
-Deena Drewis, “What We Call What Women Write.”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
The easy money for a critic is to rail on about the corporate pablum of the monoculture. But on some level people do want their Potter-inspired tears, it truly means something to them. Hollywood PR flackery is at best only a partial culprit. Most of the people who will arrive at the movie theatre in nervous anticipation this Friday night are not mere automatons of a capitalist machine. Listening to them on the news, in all the endless End Of An Era pieces, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the depth of the longing in their voices. It’s like the memory of something very good is just beyond their reach, and the movie promises, if vaguely, to remind them of it.
Michelle Dean, “What Harry Potter Knows”
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
The Details team met me at a trendy, white-vinyl-upholstered East Village bar they’d leased out for the day. Except for the lighting guy, a droll ponytailed German who looked to be about my age, they were all disconcertingly young, mid-twenties at most. I got the feeling they were assistants and interns getting their shot at a shoot of their own. I’d been carefully growing out my hair, hoping to counteract the staidness of my hardcover photo, in which I’d hoped to look unpretentious but just looked angry and square. But comparing my actual face to the one on that same picture from the press kit, the hair stylist shook her head and set about re-trimming my hair. They then dressed me, for no reason I could fathom, in 80’s garb—a dark suit jacket and a striped polo shirt with the collar flipped.
Alex Shakar reflects back on selling his first novel in 2001: an exciting year of personal hype and loss.
This post is part of our “Best of 2011” series, which highlights exceptional original pieces that have been published on The Millions this year.
Source: themillions.com
It’s no secret how crazy the concept of ‘gendered’ writing makes me. What, Jane Austen has to wear a strap-on to be taken seriously? Female is a gender; it is not a genre of literature.
Elissa Schappell, Author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls, check out her interview with BOMB in this long read. (via bombmagazine)
You might want to complement this fantastic interview with Deena Drewis’ eye opening piece “What We Call what Women Write.” It’s definitely one of the best essays we ran in 2011.
Source: bombmagazine
