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.
The week’s best online fiction, with recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Companion in Travel: Elizabeth Bishop
The reissue of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected POEMS and PROSE by Farrar, Straus and Giroux at the centennial of her birth is an opportunity for new readers to discover her work. After all, Bishop’s poems hinge on the experience of discovery, a discovery that demands awareness, not preparation.