Beyond Good and Evil Sold Eleven Copies

Will Lloyd hearts the lads.

Letter from Philadelphia

"My father grew up here and escaped. I ran back."

A Living Remedy

Nicole Chung's A Living Remedy is the latest "American poverty" memoir to be embraced by corporate media. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was hardly the first, but it seems central to the theme among contemporary titles. A modified excerpt of Nicole Chung's book appears at The Atlantic, and in Esquire she recognizes that she most likely could have helped her parents a lot more if she hadn't chosen a writing career. It seems worth noting that among millions of Americans, helping parents is rarely considered; rather, it's a value left behind in the Old Worlds of multiple continents.

Philip Roth will never die

For Esquire, Erin Somers wrote about her "Wild Weekend at the Philip Roth Festival."

to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."

~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena

reading update

READING UPDATE: I'm making good progress with Yukio Mishima's Life for Sale, but I put it down to read two satisfying magazine pieces this weekend: "The Novelists Whose Inventions Went Too Far" by D. T. Max and "The Melancholy Universe" by Laszlo F. Foldeyni. I'm also cheating on the Mishima with a new library book, The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena.