Full Stop Recommends: Bill Callahan’s guitar-plucking, Wright Thompson’s sports writing, Wikipedia’s Victorian factoids, Ingmar Bergman’s film-making, and Breaking Bad’s American Dream.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Recently awarded the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, Marco Roth is a founding editor of the popular magazine n+1. Full Stop interviewed Roth via e-mail and discussed feeling old in your twenties, William Hazlitt, and getting younger.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
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.