Julio Cortázar has left even bolder suggestions for readers of his experimental novel Hopscotch, published 50 years ago today, June 28. He invites them to start the novel at chapter 73 and then proceed through the novel’s 155 sections in a prescribed order — Cortázar gives a list of the alternative sequence in his “Table of Instructions” — leaping back and forth in the book, until they finally finish, having already read 132 through 155, with chapter 131. To make matters more interesting, he asks readers to skip chapter 55 completely (I will admit I cheated and read it anyway), and to read one of the chapters twice.

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Fifty years ago — on June 25, 1963 — Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 had its US premiere in New York City. It’s a transparently autobiographical film about a world famous director unable to finish his next film, beset by doubts, anxieties, and nightmares. As the film opens, our hero Guido, Fellini's alter ego, played by Marcello Mastroianni, faces a dilemma that may be familiar to many: What if your deadline arrived, but you had written nothing? What if people came to hear you, but you had nothing to say? What would happen if you ran out of ideas?

Could you get away with creating something about the inability to create, something about your crisis of creativity? About your state of mind, your dreams of glory, your fantasies of perfection, and also about your middle-of-the-night dread? Could you turn your crisis of creativity into your subject?

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1. THE FIRST PUBLIC EXHIBITION of the papers and personal effects of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño is the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) exhibit “Bolaño Archive. 1977–2003,” the result of the Centre’s partnership with Bolaño’s widow, Carolina López, who along with her two children, Lautaro and Alexandra, constitute Bolaño’s heirs. The intensity of Bolaño’s posthumous fame — his second life as a cult literary idol — must be both mesmerizing and repellant to López, who for over two decades was the partner of an author for whom recognition was elusive. In the years since Bolaño’s passing, López has only rarely spoken to the press, primarily to dispel rumors. The exhibition, which will close just weeks before the 10th anniversary of Bolaño’s early death from liver failure, is not only an unprecedented point of access to his creative process but also a unique opportunity to investigate Bolaño himself: not the winsome headshot on the back jacket, not the collective dream of his admirers, but Bolaño the immigrant, the worker, the father, the artist, the man.

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Fifty years ago, it was still possible to believe that drugs could free our minds and transform the world; the chemical evangelist had not yet become a figure of total ridicule. The spirit of Rimbaud, with his systematic derangement of the senses for transforming poets into seers, could be felt among the Beats; the psychologist Timothy Leary, drawing on his Harvard Psilocybin Project experiments of 1960–62, hymned the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics; and in 1964, with all these precedents as inspiration, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters embarked on the psychedelic cross-country bus trip that would be immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Just a few years earlier, Kesey had eviscerated America's conformist culture in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but now he claimed that fiction writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form. The promise of a different world lay in the trip itself:

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In Konigsburg’s 1967 Newbery Prize–winning book From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the young protagonists, Claudia and Jamie, take to the city to escape the ennui of their suburban home. They are middle class white children bucking both the postwar trend of “white flight” and the popular literary convention in which children only thrive in rural, natural environments. As middle class white families deserted urban centers, Konigsburg presented the city as a place where children can have the independence to explore and learn in ways not available to them in the more homogenous and controlled suburbs.

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For almost two decades, Colum McCann has labored at a very old truth indeed: that the burdens of the past condition the present. It wasn’t, however, until his fifth entry in this project, the 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin, that McCann was widely hailed as a visionary. Though the book, with its array of perspectives and its interest in the ways in which the past lives on in the present, hardly marked a radical departure from McCann’s previous four novels, it earned him universal critical acclaim, a National Book Award, and the big audience that had hitherto eluded him. Its success seemed due in no small part to its subject matter: arranging a Joycean cast of urban dwellers around Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, Let the Great World Spin made an indelible and appealing contribution to the fledgling cohort of 9/11 novels.

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Born in Ireland and living in New York, McCann replied to a series of questions by email, discussing, among other things, the thin line between history and fiction, the bonds between Ireland and America, and his unabashed fondness for research.

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JON WIENER: When you started, did you have a time frame in mind? Did you think you could do this for 50 years?

ROBERT SILVERS: No. [laughs] What happened was this: there was a great newspaper strike in New York in the autumn of 1962, and my friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, had the inspiration — which he imparted to the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick — that this was the one time in history that you could start a book review without a penny, since all the publishing houses had no place to advertise their new books. No New York Times Book Review. Jason and I knew that, if we started a plausible book review, then all the publishers would simply have to take a page. They had to show their authors that they were publishing books.

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Wai Chee Dimock, "Better Than the Yale Club"

THAT'S WHAT NICK SAYS, at the end of the party in Tom Buchanan’s New York apartment. The words are Baz Luhrmann’s, not Fitzgerald’s. In the novel Nick has hated the party, hated Tom’s shameless flaunting of his affair, and the callowness of the assembled friends. The evening has wound up with Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose when she dares to say Daisy’s name, a scene Fitzgerald handles with crisp disdain, with Myrtle’s exact words and then the bloody towels on the floor all duly recorded. In the film, the bloody towels are gone; Tom’s blow to Myrtle is indexed almost in passing. What’s front and center is jazz music overlaid with Jay-Z’s rap soundtrack, exploding with the kaleidoscopic colors of the bacchanalian scene, and, of course, the stunning visual effect of the lit-up apartment windows across the street, their interiors opening up magically one by one and rising out of the façade, with the help of the 3-D technology.

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1. The Crack-Up 

WHEN THE 1920S WERE OVER, Scott Fitzgerald cracked up. The world he’d helped create — The Jazz Age — had ended. By the time he died in 1940, at age 44, most of his works were out of print. He was not forgotten so much as he was willfully put out of mind.

I’ve loved Fitzgerald since I was a teenager, and over the years I’ve read nearly everything he published. The Great Gatsby has never been my favorite, although I don’t despise it. The hardness and grace of his style in Gatsby are astonishing, and there’s no question that it’s his most perfect novel, by far. My favorites, though, are his imperfect novels, the ones where his poetry and humanity show through the prose: Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, short stories like “The Freshest Boy” or “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the Crack-Up essays.

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Postwar American history divides into two halves. For the first three decades, those on middle and low incomes did well out of rising prosperity and inequality fell. In the second half, roughly from the mid–1970s, this process went into reverse. Set on apparent autopilot, the gains from growth were heavily colonized by the superrich, leaving the bulk of the workforce with little better than stagnant incomes.

The return of inequality to levels last seen in the 1920s has had a profound effect on American society, its values, and its economy. The United States led the world in the building of a majority middle class. As early as 1956, the celebrated sociologist, C. Wright Mills, wrote that American society had become “less a pyramid with a flat base than a fat diamond with a bulging middle.”

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I find it equally natural to speak of ‘Mr. Showmanship’ Liberace as if he were another person.

— Wladziu “Lee” Valentino Liberace
THE STORIES LIBERACE TOLD ABOUT HIMSELF were nothing like the one Steven Soderbergh told in HBO’s biopic Behind The Candelabra. The new film, which focuses on the relationship between the flamboyant piano-playing entertainer (Michael Douglas) and his lover and companion of five years, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), is based on Thorson’s 1988 memoir of the same name. The film adaptation, like the book, is an intimate look at a same-sex relationship, chronicling Liberace’s courtship of the much-younger Thorson, Thorson’s ensuing tenure as Liberace’s live-in lover and right-hand man, and the messy breakup in the early 80’s that resulted in a “palimony” lawsuit and much tabloid fodder before Liberace died of AIDS in February 1987. Thorson wrote his book in the wake of the ex-couple’s long, acrimonious legal battle, and his portrait of Liberace is both tender and unsparing. It reveals details of the aging entertainer’s personal life — his face lifts and penis implant, his appetite for pornography and his AIDS — that Liberace, who was famously obsessed with hiding his sexuality and his cosmetic enhancements, had been determined to keep secret. Thorson’s story is, in other words, a tell-all about an entertainer who was determined to go to the grave telling nothing.

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SOMETHING SPECIAL was brewing in the East Coast literary world after World War II. Long before, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells had documented the shift of national culture from Boston to New York. The intervening 60 or so years had seen another major shift. As the model of the movie star became the decisive influence in literature as in so many fields, a lot more bells and whistles were added to the idea of the American writer. It wasn’t enough any longer merely to achieve; you had to be seen to achieve. Whether it was the ostentatious physical risks of Hemingway the bullfighter and white hunter, or the guttered candle of Fitzgerald in Hollywood, this new American writer not only had to write, but to be, preferably in a flamboyant, self-dramatizing configuration of talent and nerve. The degree of failure or success was somewhat less important than making an unforgettable impression. As Jack Kerouac wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones […] [who] burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” — and he was not alone.

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Into this complex terminology, enter Rayna James (Connie Britton) and Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere), the lead characters of ABC’s Nashville, created by former Nashville resident Callie Khouri. Khouri is a film veteran who wrote 1991’s Thelma & Louise, a feminist classic that also won her the Academy Award for best original screenplay (typically a heavily male-dominated category). In its first season, the show has explored what it means to be both feminine and feminist in the world of country music and television.

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IN JUNE OF LAST YEAR, celebrity gossip website TMZ uploaded a video of Benicio del Toro on a sidewalk in Los Angeles. The outing was entirely unremarkable save for one detail: an older gentleman accompanying the actor kept attempting to get out of frame. Days later, several more reputable outlets — Vulture, Slate, and The Guardian among them — realized something TMZ had not: the man in question was Terrence Malick, the quote-unquote reclusive filmmaker responsible for Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life, and the newly released To the Wonder. At the time the video was uploaded, Malick had made only a handful of under-the-radar public appearances since the 1970s, which had earned him a disproportionately enigmatic reputation as a result; he had also won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival and been nominated for three more by the Academy. A few months later, another video surfaced — this one of Malick dancing to country music at a bar in Austin. Both went as close to viral as blurry footage of an art-house filmmaker possibly could and restarted the perpetual rumor machine that has long been a part of Malick’s public image.

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Why has Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the elitist, eccentric, racist New England writer of that specialized brand of fear literature known as “cosmic horror,” lasted and prospered where other, better writers have been forgotten.

After all, Lovecraft was not the best of his era in any of the genres he wrote in. Clark Ashton Smith was a better stylist. Algernon Blackwood wrote better horror. Olaf Stapledon wrote better science fiction. Yet it is Lovecraft who has been canonized with a Library of America edition, who has provided the source material for academic writings, comic books, and even game shows like Jeopardy, and who has been assimilated by capitalist culture to the point that there are plushies made of his characters.

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