College friends fret on the eve of separation. Going into the world, they feel that the future sparkles with limitless possibility and that their bond is unbreakable. Quickly a sort of social gravity catches them out, revealing that for adults choices are few and ties are tenuous. Their trajectories—pulling apart, drawing calamitously close—plot the erratic orbit of modern existence.
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The Hook has a piece on the unfortunate situation at the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Alison Flood of the Guardian covers an attack on Michel Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoire by a Goncourt judge.
Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.
The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed. I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily.
Alastair Jamieson at the Telegraph (with help from Simon Winchester et alii) notes that the Oxford English Dictionary will not be printed again.
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered has a segment in which chick lit authors gnash their teeth over Jonathan Franzen’s talent and success.
Recommended with reservations.
The Huffington Post talks to Don Lee, Richard Burgin, and Dawn Raffel about writing short stories.
In the New York Times, Fiona Maazel reviews Matthew Sharpe’s You Were Wrong.
What’s most winning about You Were Wrong, Sharpe’s fourth novel, is its acumen and the brio with which his sentence-making bears it out. This book is rich with devastatingly comic observations about people, places and things—observations that fortify a novel whose subject and, well, whose stake in the horror and pathos of being alive seem flimsy in comparison.
