From the Mouths of Babes: Karl “The Kaiser” Lagerfeld
If a person is famous for any reason at all, they are doing something right that the rest of us are doing wrong. Period. It’s one of the few universally agreed-upon truths in the confusing times we live in, and a fact we all have to accept before moving forward here today.
P.G. Wodehouse: Lessons for the Modern Age
British humorist P.G. Wodehouse draws on such predecessors as Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle as fodder for inspiration, resulting in stories that feel very much like being wrapped up in a tweed jacket with a nightcap on hand and a perfectly elevated footstool conveying the warmth of a crackling fire through woolen socks.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
After Precocity: J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger’s subject is not precocious childhood at all, the experience of knowing too much too early, but what comes after: the prospects of precocious children once adulthood has caught up to them. Kenneth Slawenski’s new biography SALINGER: A LIFE brings Salinger’s less recognized status as a writer for adults excellently, and elegantly, into relief.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
It might not be a winning formula to emphasize that Flannery O’Connor considered the topical matters that so engross certain readers—questions about the effects of consumerism, deforestation, and sexual repression—trivial compared to the fate of a single person’s soul. It would, however, be accurate.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Forbidding Zones: Hersey’s Hiroshima and Vollmann’s Fukishima
The differences in tact and tone of the pieces reflect the passage of time, and unfortunately, that the hour is already terribly late. We are amidst the peril of atomic energy, and no matter how urgent the reporting, no matter how dire the warnings, we, like the journalists, are bound to wander through its devastation.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Three Ways to Respond to Your Bully: The Failings of the Modern University
Though strange bedfellows, these books can go some distance in repairing the fractured relationship between the university and society at large.