Dan popkey linkedin12/19/2023 ![]() Five or so stories a day the past six months, pulled from work published in the last fifty years. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of short stories as I’m editing a Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story. ![]() –Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub social media editor Is your heart warm yet? If not, you might want to get that checked out. When it comes to heartwarming television, I suggest Josh Thomas’ new Freeform show Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, a sort of parallel coming-of-age story about a 25-year-old Australian man who becomes the guardian of his two teenage American half-sisters after their father dies. I went in with almost no knowledge of this one, which I recommend, so I won’t say more than that this is the perfect novel for the winter doldrums. It’s melancholy, tense, and thoroughly gorgeous. For the former, I recommend Julia Phillips’ gorgeous Disappearing Earth, which is bleak in setting-the remote Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. ![]() This time of year makes me want vaguely bleak books and unabashedly heartwarming television. I get it, we get it, but the self-flagellating pessimism is getting a little… rote? Which is why I have fallen in love the University of Minnesota’s An Ecotopian Lexicon, a sly collection of eco-forward essays that reimagine ways of thinking through radical ecologies, post-scarcity realities, and transformative climate justice, described as follows:įrom “Apocalypso” to “Qi,” “ ~*~ “ to “Total Liberation,” thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet dizzying lexicon, expanding the limited European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, educators, scholars, students, and citizens have inherited. The last 18 months-as massive pillars of ice calve like porch icicles into the southern ocean-has seen the publication of a half-dozen diligently collated books that present to us the details of civilization’s imminent collapse like so many hidden charges on a hotel bill. I am having a certain level of conceptual fatigue when it comes to ongoing climate collapse. It feels like just the beginning of seeing that kind of writing and communication authentically depicted in books and media, and it took Resnick’s words to help me recognize how my own communication with friends is (shocking!) a practice in writing. I realized my love for Rooney’s depiction of modern communication had everything to do with the specificity of the way I text my best friend and the narrative universe we have created in that method of speech––how we are used to writing our lives to each other daily, minutely. It was mainly one sentence from the review that made me stop, rethink my entire life, and understand my generation in a new light (casual!): “For them, communicating through text and e-mail, Facebook and I.M.-which is to say through writing-is as instinctive as speech, sometimes preferable to it.” Finally, I had words to explain how important the particular method of texting, dialogue, and conversation depicted in Rooney’s novels, more specifically Conversations With Friends, had felt to me: these conversations had a gravity I’ve always felt difficult to name, partly because I never recognized them as “writing,” per se.Īnd yet there it was, summed up succinctly in that one sentence of Resnick’s. Written by Sarah Resnick, it’s a smart and riveting review of the upcoming book Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey that ties the certain method of narrative control and storytelling represented in Popkey’s book to Rooney novels and the TV show Fleabag, which are, how could you guess, also exactly my cup of tea. I’ll recommend a New Yorker article that was published in January that I’ve thought about and talked about relentlessly since I read it.
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