The Paris Review

Do you happen to know in which London borough Zadie Smith was born? Or on which continent Nathan Englander set his first novel?

If you know the answer to both of these questions, then write to me at this e-mail address. The first person to get both questions right will win two tickets to hear Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander speak at a benefit event for Matawi, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping young Somali and Kenyan refugee women attend college. The event will be on December 2 at 8:00 P.M. at the SVA Theater in Chelsea, with a reception to follow. Seats normally sell for $100; VIP tickets are $250 (and are still available online).

So come on, you literary buffs—show me what you’ve got!

Zadie Smith takes aim at The Social Network, writing, “It’s clear that this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people.” It’s an assessment that echoes what Lawrence Lessig wrote for The New Republic a few weeks back: “But the most frustrating bit of The Social Network is ... its failure to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story. In interviews given after making the film, Sorkin boasts about his ignorance of the Internet. That ignorance shows.” Agreed, but the truth is—you still gotta see it. In the same way everyone joins the real Facebook to complain about it, everyone sees the film in order to join the discussion. —Thessaly La Force

The weather’s turned; time to make a cup of tea and settle down with something melancholy. Jonathan Franzen’s elegy for David Foster Wallace, read at the New York memorial following his suicide two years ago, is a good place to start. Franzen’s heartache as he describes his friend’s ultimately doomed efforts to climb out of a hole of “infinite sadness” is palpable. Follow it up with “The Boy,” a previously unpublished DFW short story that recently appeared on the Internet. Sure, it’s depressing to remember that Wallace will never write anything new, but one can’t help but be grateful for the work he did leave us. —Miranda Popkey

Too much of what I read these days is distraction: an irritating flurry of sexist commentary on the DKE “no means yes” incident at Yale, and a dispiriting analysis of Bush’s attempt at image rehabilitation: “He seems to think that baffled surprise, on the part of a President, is somehow exculpatory. (It is not.)” So it was nice to curl up with something timeless and humanizing this week—Howards End, by E. M. Forster. Here are the Schlegel sisters at the end of the book: “The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed … Life passed. The tree rustled again.” Thanks, Mr. Forster. —Kate Waldman

For some good eighteenth-century gossip, read Doctor Augustin Cabanes’s Cabinet secret de l’histoire. It's not an easy book to find: You have to look for copies in carts along the Seine or in antiquarian shops, but they are fun to collect. Apparently, some aristocrats tried to pay Marie-Antoinette’s doctor, Seiffert, to start a rumor that the Queen could not conceive because of de Lamballe’s “moral influence.” De Lamballe was Marie-Antoinette’s attending lady and the envy of all the other ladies of the court. Which is probably why de Lamballe was the first woman to be guillotined during the Revolution, her flesh impaled upon a spike and paraded all over Paris. —Alexandra Zukerman

Two years ago, in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Booker Prize, The Guardian dredged up a judge from every single year willing to dish on the behind-the-scenes goings-on: Wives promote their husbands' books; punches are thrown; Salman Rushdie is insulted. Another Booker-related treat: a funny and surprisingly poignant profile of aging table-tennis great Marty Reisman, written in 1999 by this year’s winner, Howard Jacobson (once a ranked junior table-tennis player in England), published for the first time in the U.S. this week by Tablet Magazine. Sample description of Marty: “a leftover Beat poet about to read to a bunch of contemporary kids in a non-English speaking country.” —Miranda Popkey

“A typical Wittgenstein gag was drawing an arrow to the ‘W.C.1’ in a London address on a letter he was going to mail and writing, ‘This doesn’t mean ‘Lavatory.’” If the great man finding amusement in such things tickles you—and it really should—you’ll enjoy the rest of Jim Holt’s little book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. And oh yes, French children are apparently fond of jokes about the fantastical creature known as the zizi tordu, or “twisted penis.” Now you’ll read the book, won’t you. —Mark de Silva

A History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. I was pulled in by the fluid, experimental structure and kept reading because Krauss, like Roth, gets Jewish families exactly right. Elie Wiesel wrote that the ambivalent “and yet” is the most Jewish of phrases; it is also protagonist Leo Gursky’s constant refrain. —Kate Waldman

The novelist Douglas Coupland previews his upcoming, five-part Massey Lecture on the culture of our near-future in the Globe and Mail. And Vaughan Bell looks backward, to an era in which murder was among our most social and democratic activities. —David Wallace-Wells

Zadie Smith has a short essay in The New Yorker's money issue about lending funds to a friend. I appreciate her honesty: “Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it.” Bonus: Zadie was a young violist, just as I was! —Thessaly La Force