Review: On Jonathan Littell’s "The Fata Morgana Books"From the Print

By × Criticism

Quietly composed for France’s Fata Morgana Press in the aftermath of The Kindly Ones—a monumental study on human baseness and Nazism—Mr. Littell’s new book at first appears to bear little resemblance to its precursor. Where The Kindly Ones is an exuberant historical novel, a 992-page behemoth of rape, incest, and murder, The Fata Morgana Books is a spare, 184-page collection of four short novellas, comparatively light, until the end, on physical violence, and stripped of the ornamental graces of period, geographical location, name, gender…

26 March (1924): Graham Greene to Elisabeth Greene

By × This Day in "Lettres"

Have you ever noticed how useful numbers are in filling up a letter? Take the tip the next time you write to anyone. If you can’t think of anything to say just write something like this, ‘I hope you are in the best of health, myself I am somewhat 7x-59q2b = (10 x 16 x 42) / (93 x 25q) + 103 = λqb/ady

Shakespeare, God, Popeye

By × Life Sentences

“I am not what I am.” Wait, what? No Fear Shakespeare—the Sparknotes guide that translates Shakespeare into “the kind of English people actually speak today”—graciously glosses this as “I am not what I appear to be,” but he doesn’t really say that does he? No, he doesn’t; he says he is not who he is. This is not a question of weird/scary Elizabethan English.

The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste

By × Criticism

A decent strategy with TED might be to reclaim our teenage capacities and treat these videos as hopelessly passé—ignore them to death. Critiquing them, even as I have done, will do what criticism has done for television: creating an added enjoyment as you go on consuming the crap you despise…

25 March (1607): John Donne to Henry Goodyer

By × This Day in "Lettres"

Though my friendship be good for nothing else, it may give you the profit of a temptation or of an affliction. It may exercise your patience, and thought it cannot allure, it shall importune you. Though I knew you have many worthy friends of all ranks, yet I add something, since I, which am of none, would fain to be your friend too. There is some of the honor and some of the degrees of a creation to make a friendship of nothing.

24 March (1948): Robert Lowell to Carley Dawson

By × This Day in "Lettres"

I’ve just been to Tenebrae at the Cathedral—a choir of Franciscans in their order’s brown, starched white ropes looped downwards, awkward gangling young men, looking like minor employees at the Library. And the psalms and lamentations were good, and I thought: “Why should anyone, who wants to believe, have much trouble?”