“The sheer volume of sales substantiates that readers respond powerfully to memoirs. McCourt’s work has been dismissed all too glibly as misery memoir, and deemed to be commercially driven or aesthetically and politically naïve by his detractors. Meanwhile, his supporters have responded to the emotional impact of the texts rather than discussing the complex set of diverse materials upon which McCourt has formed his narrative: namely Ireland itself, the status of the memoir genre, and Irish-American identity.”
Category: words
The New Yorker Creates A Poetry Bot
Starting today, the poetry bot, available on Twitter and Facebook Messenger, will send out a poetry excerpt at random every day for the next ninety-two days.
Hawaii Has A Word That’s Even Stranger Than Philadelphia’s ‘Jawn’
Around this time last year, Dan Nosowitz told us about the City of Brotherly Shove Love’s all-purpose word, jawn, which can stand in for any noun, abstract or concrete, proper or common. Since then, readers have alerted him to an even more flexible term, one that can function as noun, verb, adjective or adverb: da kine.
What Would Mark Twain Think Of Donald Trump?
Sure, it’s easy (and safe) to presume that Twain would have mocked the 45th President mercilessly. Yet, argues Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Twain would have found Trump the showman – the pre-2016 version – a fascinating figure.”
Danger – Is Our Writing Getting More Extreme And Political?
“I have been drawn, almost against my will, to notice the intensifying politicization of the literary world and, hand in hand with that, a predilection for melodrama, for prose that stimulates extreme emotions — in good causes of course. The cause justifies the melodrama. The melodrama serves the cause.”
Amazon Is Moving A Brick And Mortar Bookstore To Town, But An Indie Thinks It Can Thrive Anyway
Blue Bunny, a children’s bookstore about a mile up the road from Amazon’s big new Boston-area bookstore, isn’t worried. The owner: “At first my heart sort of sunk a bit, but I realized quickly the response from our friends was what you have in your independent bookstore is very, very different than what Amazon is providing, and I think that we’re going to be OK.”
A Writer Turns To Toni Morrison To Get Past The Fear Of A White Audience
“I’ve known for a long time that as a black person, some white people expect a performance from me, something that might confirm what they think they know about my identity. … What surprised me was that these questions took up so much imaginative space, and did it so quickly, and were in fact so large and puzzling that they stopped me from writing anything.”
George Saunders: What Do Writers Actually *Do* When They Write?
Saunders, whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo just came out and is on many bestseller lists: “We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he ‘wanted to express’, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.”
The First Fiction Smuggled Out Of North Korea Reveals A Lot About Life There
The book, which was written from 1989-1995 and hidden away until a chain of strangers had the chance to smuggle it out, is a series of stories that “are a frank look at the life of regular citizens trying to get by under a repressive regime. Many of the characters fail to grasp the reality of the world in which they live, either through ignorance, stubbornness, or a misguided hope that the regime is more reasonable than it really is.”
The New Yorker’s Cartoon Editor Is Stepping Aside After 20 Years
Fortunately, Bob Mankoff is going back to drawing for the magazine. “It’s a lot easier picking cartoons than doing them,” he says. “But it’s not quite as much fun. … Those are muscles that can atrophy, but I think they’re still there.”