The winners of the National Book Awards were selected this week following an evening in which all the nominees participated in a reading hosted by New School.University. Even though I have no idea whether or not the judges attended the readings, I couldn’t help noticing that the best readers — at least in poetry and fiction — ended up winning in their categories. [Read more…]
The Middlemarch Millennial
Christopher Witte
I find Millennial bashing to be as fashionable a recreation these days as combinatory yoga-pilates. Everyone from Time Magazine to Aaron Sorkin to Michelle Obama has taken a healthy swing or two, and younger people are exercising a right to reciprocal ire. Yet take a step back and this intergenerational warfare, fought across the trenches of technology-swayed narcissism and entitlement, arguably resembles a more fundamental and timeless sort of conflict – the pitting of emergent youth against traditionalist elders. While a simple examination of a historical case (e.g. the criticism heaped upon the sixties counterculture generation) might be sufficient to evince this, it is again ample occasion to turn to our literary canon in order to widen our scope and defog our vision – this time through considering the famous work “Middlemarch” by George Eliot. [Read more…]
In Defense of Thoreau
Someone once told me “Walden” was a sort of hipster bible. A young, affluent twenty-something shuns convention, builds a cabin in the woods, and reflects on the nature of being; in all likelihood he sprouts a man-beard along the way. This put me off the work for at least half a decade, until, in the throes of devouring the writings of Tolstoy, I stumbled across the novelist uplifting a particular American name and wholeheartedly praising his ideas. The name was Henry David Thoreau – that of the early American transcendentalist. It was then I pried open the pages of Walden, and discovered a work of truly life-altering scope. [Read more…]
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