Hello friends!
I’m here not with a new post as such but a link to a new essay I published today on LitHub. They chose an Internet click-worthy title (as they have to) but I’m sticking with the original, “Franchise Children and Disney Adults: What Would Happen if Writers Decided to Stop Selling Themselves?” I originally intended this to appear here on the Substack, but once it passed the 4000-word mark I thought I should find a larger venue for it.
In the meantime, here are some of the books I’m in the middle of reading (or plan to read) this summer.
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy and Borders, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Vanessa is an incisive, in-your-face commentator on contemporary pop culture. This is her first book.
I haven’t gotten very far into my friend Justin Taylor’s new novel Reboot, but I can already tell it’s the funniest book I’ll read this year. A scorching satire of the music business and the mores of the indie-hipster class.
I found Marta Morrazzoni’s The Invention of Truth (originally published 1995, long out of print) on one of my new favorite Twitter accounts, Neglected Books. It’s a tiny, jewel-like novel with one thread about the last days of John Ruskin and the other about the weaving of the Bayeux Tapestry. FFO Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, John Haskell.
Also a Twitter recommendation, also long out of print. For obvious reasons, I’m interested in the post-Holocaust political imagination of American Jews these days, and will probably end up writing about this subject in On Being Short or elsewhere. Also on this subject, Ruth Wisse’s Jews and Power, Ari Shlaim’s The Iron Wall, and David Mamet’s essays, especially Writing in Restaurants.
Italo Calvino once wrote that this was the greatest novel written after World War II. I should have read it while I was writing The New Earth, but the problem with trying to write a Very Long Novel is that you never have time to read and absorb all the other Very Long Novels. If you liked Cortázar’s Hopscotch, you a) probably already own a copy of this book and b) will really enjoy it if you ever get around to cracking it open.
Simon Wu is a fascinating young art critic and curator (full disclosure, we’re both on the curatorial board of The Racial Imaginary Institute) and a very smart writer who’s able to glimpse horizons of contemporary aesthetics that old people like me just…cannot. That’s why we need him.
Thank you as always for reading and clicking, and I’ll be back with another, longer post soon.
Jess