Listicles, tweets, your ex’s Facebook status, picture of dogs wearing costumes — the internet offers no shortage of entertaining stuff to look at. But there’s plenty of substantial writing out there, too, the pieces you spend a few minutes reading and a long time thinking about after you’ve closed the tab. In this weekly feature, Flavorwire shares the best of that category. This week, casting the adaptation for The Goldfinch, a great issue of Guernica, spooky real estate, and more.
“The American South: On the Map and in the Mind,” Guernica‘s special issue
We could just feature this entire special issue of Guernica as the best thing we read on the net this week, and that would really cover it. An interview with Jesmyn Ward, this great essay by Lincoln Michel, and this one by Catherine Lacey, all make this something you must spend a day reading.
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is being turned into a movie, and the folks at The Millions are just the ones to ask about who should play who in one of the few film adaptations of great novels we’d bother seeing.
“Unhousing” by Colin Dickey, The Paris Review
Freud and Shirley Jackson both pop into Colin Dickey’s essay that will have you looking at house hunting in a whole different light.
“Literary Fan Fiction: John Banville Does Raymond Chandler” by Alexander Aciman, The New Republic
What’s the deal with all the literary fan fiction that people are getting paid to write? Using Benjamin Black’s new Philip Marlowe novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde, Alexander Aciman explores “literary impersonation.”
“Angst and Apocalypse: Nancy Lee on Adolescence in the ’80s” by Anna Fitzpatrick, Hazlitt
We somehow didn’t catch Nancy Lee’s 1980s coming-of-age novel, The Age, when it was released. Thankfully, this Hazlitt interview made us seek it out.
“The Death of the Bargain Bin” by Kevin Lincoln, New York Times Magazine
The internet and its algorithms have changed the way we discover new art. As Lincoln points out in this great piece, Netflix has made it incredibly difficult to stumble upon some forgotten film that you might consider a classic.