“The impression I have is that a great fat omnivorous crab named United States of America is sitting on top of the Pan-American hemisphere, sucking the marrow from its soft underside. The Coca-Colonization of the world. . .”
Hot on the heels of the recently published Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti letters comes the otherworldly Ferlinghetti Travel diaries Writing Across the Landscape, excerpted on Lithub today
“The narrator (again named Eileen) recalls reading a usually showstopping poem to no response and realizing the crowd was mesmerized by live footage of Acker’s arm being projected on a huge scale on a screen behind her: “I am the backup singer to Kathy Acker’s fucking tattoos.”
Lidija Haas on Dodie Bellamy and Eileen Myles, tricky friendships and tricky writing in Bookforum
“With a title like Purity, Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel sets the reader up for great expectations, and how. What Franzen does well in every novel is to tell a sprawling story with a robust and intimately rendered casts of characters. At the outset of this one, we meet Pip (hello, Charles Dickens), a recent college graduate who is clever and ambitious, but aimless. She’s saddled with student debt (as if her creator had studied a few popular magazines and websites in order to understand the condition of today’s young people), works odd jobs, and struggles to separate herself from an overbearing and possibly insane mother.”
Roxane Gay reviews Purity for NPR
