- From the annotated table of contents of n+1‘s third issue, out now:
Under conditions of the reading crisis, everything a writer does, no matter how self-serving and reprehensible, becomes a blow in the service of literature. If ‘books’ are ‘good,’ as the mantra goes, you don’t have to face how good or bad your book actually is.
- “We’ve been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.”
- An opera based on Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince will be performed by the New York City Opera this November. (Via this week’s Studio 360.)
- Melville and Twain: “they anticipated what Walker Percy called the great secret of the 20th century: ‘only the haters seem alive.’ And they produced America’s greatest novels: ‘Moby-Dick’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn.'”