This month's Believer has a lot of great articles, but I'd like to pull out a couple of things in particular.
From Rich Cohen's "Closing Time: The history of America is the history of the automobile industry--which is far older and stranger than you might imagine." (which you can read sans subscription here):
QUOTE 1: The auto dealerships were hit early and hard. As the papers filled with stories about the industry on the edge of collapse, the salesman suddenly seemed less like a hateful hawker of false promises than like a sad relic. This American character, no less archetypal than the logger or trapper, was dying. (There is blood on the showroom floor!) The cowboy circa 1910, at the closing of the frontier.
QUOTE 2: When I decided to write a story about the salesmen of cars, used and new, it was because I believed the car salesman to be a preacher in the church of the American dream.
And he's right. What would On the Road be without cars? On the Road, of course, being a book that nearly every male Obie read in high school, giving him dreams of being a zen convert and trekking across America (until he realized that the Beatniks are gone, and good riddance). It's like asking where Huck Finn would be without the Mississippi, or where The Odyssey would be without boats.
From Sara Gran and Megan Abbott's "Dark Family: V.C. Andrews and the secret lives of girls." (Need subscription. You can find a copy in Mudd)
QUOTE 1: [W]e find in Andrews's books a more disturbing look at the secret lives of girls.
QUOTE 2: [W]e would see a full flowering of adolescent-girl rage.
QUOTE 3: Returning to Andrews's books as an adult, they retain their fairy-tale quality. As with re-reading favorite children's books, the experience is like stepping into a dream. There's a sense of deja vu, as that which has been forgotten--not just the books but the whole world of associations they carry--becomes real again. But given the luridness and eccentricity of the books, the felling is far from a cozy one. It's a feeling many of us resist: Do we want to venture into that world again? Do we want to admit how much we loved that world or, worse, how much our desires, in fact, constructed it?
Is there any doubt that Twilight is the new Flowers in the Attic?
AND, think about hipster irony. Now think about the third quote. I know, right?
Go read "My Father's Murder: Anger, memoir, and lies in Chicago 1979." It's amazing. Go to Mudd, read.
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