What I learned from Joan Acocella’s review of Paula Fox’s News from the World: Stories and Essays in the New Yorker:

• She is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, all of which were out of print until the mid-90s.
• She is the daughter of an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter and a nineteen-year-old Cuban-American woman
• She wrote the Newbery Award-winning novel The Slave Dancer, which I read in eighth grade, along with 22 other YA novels.
• She experienced a significant literary revival after being praised by Jonathan Franzen in “Perchance to Dream,” a landmark essay on realism versus postmodernism.
• She is the grandmother of Courtney Love.

What George Eliot Teaches Us: Great article about George Eilot more than 150 years after her birth. New Yorker columnist Rebecca Mead reflects upon how Eliot’s works have impacted her life… and made me think about my own postgraduate encounters with Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Subscription required.

“Nightmare,” Nancy Franklin on NBC’s Late Night Debacle

“O’Brien’s career won’t suffer. No doubt he’ll soon be Fantastic Mr. Fox, his blend of sophisticated sophomoricism, grossness, and inventiveness fitting right in with that network.”

via (New Yorker)