Monday, April 27, 2020

Another Side Effect Of COVID: People Are Having Trouble Reading

French Intellectuals Recommend George Sand, Nabokov, And Other Classics For The Duration


Says Claude Romano, a French philosopher, “One can be tempted to read in order to escape, but one can also read to fully inhabit the present moment and make it the space of a meditation.” That’s why he recommends a Japanese work called The Interminable Rain. – Le Monde



Accepting, suffering or resisting? How lockdown is affecting Britons

The study found clear dividing lines between those who are coping well and those who are suffering under lockdown.


Garth Greenwell Thinks More Writers Should Write About Sex


Greenwell, the author of What Belongs to Youand Cleanness, compares his new book to Schubert’s Winterreise and says, “It’s not that I think writing sex explicitly is in and of itself interesting, but that what interested me was the combination of sex with the kind of sentence I’m attracted to – a sentence with a history that comes through Proust and James and Woolf and Baldwin.” – The Guardian (UK)

 Another Side Effect Of COVID: People Are Having Trouble Reading


This is especially true at (now-online) universities, reports Emma Pettit, for students and professors alike. And as professors find themselves unable to focus on the reading they need to do for their research, they’re becoming more understanding of their students’ difficulties — and their requests to ditch the textbooks for the rest of the semester. – The Chronicle of Higher Education

How Did Writers Survive The Great Depression? They Organized


Jason Boog recounts how his experience as a (non-)working writer during the Great Recession moved him to rediscover the story of the publishing industry’s first strike. – Literary Hub