[A Joke About Things Not Rising]

At Bookforum, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s argument for prioritizing nonfiction over fiction in high school English classes — “just maybe the novel is not the best device for transmitting ideas, grand themes, to hormonal, boisterous, easily distracted, immature teenagers” — begins with: “It wasn’t until my second reading of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, over a decade after it first had been assigned to me by my public high school English teacher, that I understood that Jake’s dick didn’t work.” GO ON. [Bookforum]