Ten Kinds of Book People It’s Impossible to Have a Conversation With
The Book Clubber. This person can’t stop talking about The Kite Runner, The Devil in the White City, The Help, and Gone Girl. Airport bookstores meet all her needs. You suspect that books not containing discussion guides terrify her. The Fast Reader. He likes books that you can read quickly, and he reads them quickly. He goes through a dozen different mystery series a year, and dips into science fiction when he has to. He has lots of positive things to say about books, but only in the most...
Too Much Sociology…or Not Enough?
“I haven’t read this yet but I feel like you will have an opinion on this,” said Becky, posting an article to my Facebook wall. She was right—you don’t need to read an editorial titled “Too Much Sociology” to correctly guess that the guy who wrote Sociology for Dummies will have something to say about it. The n+1 editors bemoan the fact that the sociology of culture, originally used to expose the structures of power that govern cultural production and consumption (in other words, why Gossip...
Why Is This Lovingly Made DIY Literary Magazine So Boring?
I was recently sent a copy of a literary magazine; it’s published by a nonprofit organization, so it’s not technically do-it-yourself, but it has a classic DIY feel to it: the pages are photocopied and stapled, and there’s a tiny little book of poetry rubber-banded inside. The cover is fastened with velcro. It’s absolutely adorable…and boring. The stories and poems inside aren’t bad, they’re just presented in a context that’s started to feel as predictable as the Loeb Classical Library. Are there whimsical little line...
Fairy Tales Retold by Their Slightly-Too-Drunk Protagonists, Years Later
Goldilocks and the Three Bears “Oh my God. Bears. You want to hear a story about bears? When I was a kid, we lived by this giant forest. I forget what it was called, Everwood or something like that. Anyway, I used to go walking in the woods by myself, which was really stupid, because people get raped and killed in those woods every year. What was the name of that girl from Munich? Anyway, so this one day I find a house of bears,...
Dear Glenn Beck: The 80s Called, and They Want Their Culture Wars Back
The 1980s were a long time ago. MTV has now been primarily about reality shows for twice as long as it was primarily about music videos. People born after the decade ended are now old enough to drink. Traveling back to the 80s would now be as much of a jump in time as it was for Marty McFly to go from the 80s to the 50s in Back to the Future. And yet, the Republican Party continues to cling desperately to the decade. It’s understandable, of...
Yes, the Liberal Arts Are In Decline—and the World’s Really Not That Sad About It
The defensive impulse is baked into the self-definition of the liberal arts as we know them, so it’s no surprise that liberal arts partisans are buzzing around as busily as ever complaining that their disciplines are in decline and looking for someone to blame. The most recent blast from the liberal arts’ crumbling ramparts was sounded in September by Joseph Epstein in The Weekly Standard. Approvingly citing Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Epstein decries a system of higher education that’s...
Comic Book Artist Sina Grace On “Not My Bag,” His First Autobiographical Work
Sina Grace has got to be one of the most blatantly sincere people working in mainstream comics today. I know this, and yet when I picked up his new book Not My Bag I expected a dense, thorough tome with a highly literary narrative like those I’ve become accustomed to from people like Craig Thompson. That sort of thing is valuable, of course. Tremendous works of art like Habibi, Persepolis, and Watchmen make for a great expenditure of your time and help legitimize the genre...
In Defense of Sharing
I do not care about your new baby. I do not care about your pirate themed wedding. I do not care about your latest trip to the farmer’s market, or the whole rosemary rubbed chicken you baked in your wood burning oven, or your cat. Fuck your cat. But I will defend to the death your right to post shit about them on social media. And I suppose I will begrudgingly defend everyone else’s right to use social media to bitch about how little they...
You Have No Idea How Much You’re Going To Love These Seven Comic Books
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe the idea of comic books has always seemed interesting but you mostly think of them as roided out superheroes for kids or weird black and white stuff that’s boring or makes you feel weird. Maybe you read Maus or Persepolis and thought “Yeah, this is neat—but what now?” Maybe the idea of walking into a comic book store full of aggressively knowledgeable nerds is frightening. Maybe you don’t even know what a comic book store is or where to find...
What Reading Game of Thrones Does to Your Everyday Life
All blondes are now the worst ever. Thanks to the Lannister clan of soulless tow-headed fuckwads, your already precarious opinion of the blondes of planet earth has soured completely. Not only are they all probably the product of unholy incest, they likely also have a blatant disregard for time-honored rights of succession (which in the modern age translates to a higher likelihood that blondes are line budgers). It is becoming increasingly difficult for you to suppress your urge to take out any passing blonde children...
Are Bestseller Lists Bad for Lit?
When you walk into a Barnes & Noble, what are the first books you see? Okay, it’s the deep-discount books in the foyer. Then what books do you see? Okay, it’s the books that publishers have paid to have promoted. But then what books do you see? Probably the books on the bestseller shelf, enticingly arranged in order of sales rank. Aren’t those, though, by definition precisely the books that need the least promotion? That’s what Michael Dirda argues in a Bookforum article. In essence, Dirda says, bestseller...
What the Lives and Deaths of My Brother’s Guinea Pigs Taught Me About the Southern Gothic
John Updike says parents get pets for children to teach them about death. I think that’s a little vague, John. Instead, I prefer to think my pets—more precisely my brother’s guinea pigs—taught me about the literary genre first popularized by Edgar Allan Poe, then perfected by the modernists William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and the playwright Tennessee Williams: the Southern Gothic. First some background. My brother had two guinea pigs named Platypus and Jupiter. They were a gift from my middle-class parents to offset my care...
