Tag: books

A Chaos of Nonconformity

Ian McEwan joins a debate about the novel’s impact today

Screen shot of novelist Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN,
delivering News to You: Literature Isn’t Dead

A few months ago, a friend texted me News to You: Literature Isn’t Dead, Ann Patchett’s impassioned defense of literary fiction’s centrality to American culture today. The novelist, who runs the bookstore Parnassus in Nashville, Tennessee, was responding to an op-ed in the New York Times by the conservative political commentator David Brooks called When Novels Mattered about a period in American history ending in the 1980s when, he claims, literary authors were audacious, big in scope, unconstrained by political correctness and liberal conformity, and therefore actually mattered to the culture – unlike now.

Patchett hit back with 15 titles that she considers audacious and significant to culture today. They are (with my annotations added on when they were published and when they were set):

Continue reading A Chaos of Nonconformity

Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)

Margaret Vetare, Herman Melville, and WNYC’s Public Song Project

Margaret Vetare at West Point Foundry Preserve, Cold Spring, New York, USA (photo by Susan English)

In May the singer-songwriter Margaret Vetare, a college friend, told me that she’d submitted a song to WNYC’s “Public Song Project” which showcases new recordings of songs made from works in the American public domain. The songs can be based on poems, books, films, existing songs, and even fictional characters. The Project announced six winners at the end of July and performed them on August 2 in front of the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City. All songs can be streamed from the “Public Song Book” online.  

Simon Close, the creator of the Public Song Project for public radio station WNYC, introduced the project’s mission and ethos in a radio special he emceed on July 26th:

Continue reading Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)