Reviews and News:
Who doesn’t love a good literary spat? It’s harmless and oddly comforting, at least for a while. Across the pond, the British Brontë Society appointed actress and model Lily Cole as a “creative partner” to help promote the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Member and author Nick Holland called Cole’s appointment a “rank farce” and said he would resign from the society.
S. T. Joshi has resurrected H.L. Mencken’s early newspaper columns for the Sun. Mencken is unsurprisingly prodigious—writing six 1,200-word columns a week—but are the columns any good? Danny Heitman reviews.
Allan Massie reviews Kurt Vonnegut’s complete short stories: “Not many writers get a complete short stories published these days, so Kurt Vonnegut’s readers can be grateful to Seven Stories Press. Nevertheless, they might have been more grateful had the publishers produced an edition in several volumes. This one runs to just over 900 pages, and weighs in at around three-and-a-half pounds. Many of us who still read short stories, and prefer hard copies, like to read them in books that you can comfortably slip into your pocket. This is, for example, how many people I know first read, and learned to love, Chekhov, and it is in such an edition that Vonnegut’s stories would best have appeared. End of grouse.”
How North America was populated: “Thanks to the ancient DNA of a six-week-old infant, scientists have a whole new understanding of how—and who—populated North America. In an article published in Nature, researchers revealed surprising new information, which has spawned different theories about how the New World was populated. In fact, they’ve named a whole new population of previously unknown people—the Ancient Beringians.”
I’m not a huge fan of lists, but here’s one that caught my eye: Top Ten Most Important Ancient Documents Lost to History.
Breaking: Wild boars in France are putting Muenster cheese production at risk. “[T]o be officially called Muenster at all, and receive the coveted AOC or AOP label affirming its quality and authenticity, there are a variety of critical stipulations. Many have to do with the fermenting procedure, but an important rule states that at least 70 percent of the cows’ feed must come from the local area of Haut-Rhin department, near Alsace. Now, reports The Local, marauding wild boars are putting the feed—and therefore the odiferous fromage—at risk.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest installment of Spiked’s cultural monthly, Spiked Review, Alexander Adams argues that this past year Marvel Comics “played to the identitarian gallery” and lost:
“The anticipated new audience of young socially aware identitarians, who were supposed to have swelled the readership base, did not materialise. Sales of many Marvel titles dropped while those of rival DC did so less. While top titles in 2017 sold as much as 300,000 units to retailers in North America, even wide promotion and some favourable publicity could not prevent sales of Ms. Marvel (Marvel’s flagship progressive title) dropping from 80,000 to 15,000. (Insiders state that 10,000 sales is the break-even point.) Forty of Marvel’s 104 new titles had been cancelled by April 2017.”
Photo: Slurpee waves
Poem: Helen Pinkerton, “Dialogue”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
