The coldest winter I ever had was summer in Paris.
“Eggers could just as well have transcribed Deng’s extraordinary story without fictionalizing it. The unadorned story, the true story humbly recorded and presented, would not have been lacking in force. The eerie, slightly sickening quality about What Is the What is that Deng’s personhood has been displaced by someone else’s style and sensibility — by someone else’s story. Deng survived his would-be killers in the Sudan, only to have his identity erased here.” (via This Space)
Gambia or The Gambia?
“Meeting a young writer at a New York gathering in the mid-1940s, he complied with good humor when the man jumped on his back in a stairwell and demanded a piggyback ride. That man turned out to be Truman Capote.”
Happy Shakespeare’s death day!
“The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large.”
“Let’s get one thing straight right away: Catherine the Great did not die having sex with a horse.”
Does the novel really need defending?
Doctors’ dirty secrets.