- Dave Eggers speaks at TED about the success of his 826 Valencia project.
- That’s not just a white suit–that’s a heavily armored ego-protecting shell. Tom Wolfe says the critiques of I Am Charlotte Simmons only prove he’s Pete Rose: “”I feel like Pete Rose did when his batting average dipped from something like .331 to .308, and he said, ‘That’s not bad for a guy entering his fourth decade.’ “
- The latest issue of Bookforum is now online. Hard to figure out where to start but I gravitated to the Jhumpa Lahiri interview, in which she discusses immigrant fiction and the Indian writer pigeonhole:
I get frustrated by this tendency to flatten whole segments of the population, like the Indian immigrant or the Jewish immigrant. I know these are just words and phrases, but I think people tend to see these other groups as a people. They are “other,” and it’s harder to see the nuances and the variations because they’re just a group of people. I have been sensitive to it my whole life, and annoyed by it. As a writer, I didn’t set out to represent a certain group of people, but I acknowledge that I write about Indians and Indian Americans. And I hope at least in writing about these characters, you can prevent those generalizations.
markathitakis.com 