Lit List: Wednesday August 17, 2016

Good evening literature lovers. Here's a round-up of today's must-read literary news, commentary and essays.

Gertrude Stein (Source: Wikipedia)

Gertrude Stein (Source: Wikipedia)

  • Gertrude Stein Wrote a Children’s Book, and It’s As Weirdly Mesmerizing As You’d Think: "Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there," Stein told her young readers; "read the words." (Slate)  
  • It never was golden: The dangers and delusions of nostalgia, from ancient Greece to Ann Coulter. (Aeon)
  • Florence Foster Jenkins Couldn’t Sing, but That Didn’t Stop Her: Alexander McCall Smith reviews a biography of the worst opera singer of all time. (The New York Times)
  • The Wild Experiments of the New Realists: On contemporary authors who break with realism to paint a better picture of everyday life. (Electric Lit)
  • Samuel Beckett’s SAT Questions: "If today is Tuesday, and Flo has just finished praying, when will she die?" (The Point) *
  • The Old, American Horror Behind "Stranger Things": Tracing the show's roots back to the eldritch world of H. P. Lovecraft. (The New Yorker)
  • Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya: A Salvadorian novelist bemoans his homeland's “intellectual and spiritual misery.” (Bookforum)

*LSP Editorial Intern Emily Lever works for the literary agency that represents the estate of Samuel Beckett.