BOMB Magazine has a conversation between poker buddies Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio.
Poker Buddies BOMB
Judy Blume on Tumblr
Judy Blume answered questions about life, writing, and her new book, In the Unlikely Event, on Alfred A. Knopf’s Tumblr on Wednesday. In case you haven’t checked it out, The Millions has a Tumblr, too.
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Concealing Horrors
“According to David Means and his debut novel, Hystopia, [classic war novels] aren’t simply about confronting the horrors of war, but also about concealing them, hiding them under a layer of rationalizations and wishful thinking that often simplifies their lawless anarchy and finds sense, meaning and purpose where there’s little.” Over at Electric Lit, Simon Chandler reviews David Means’s Hystopia.
Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
Once a decade, Granta publishes a special “Best of Young American Novelists” issue featuring work from American fiction writers under the age of forty. The latest list includes Millions staffer and City on Fire author Garth Risk Hallberg, as well as Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Claire Vaye Watkins, to name just a few. The issue will hit shelves on May 4th.
The Deletionist
“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
Curiosities: Thug, Libidinal, Linoleum, Limn
The Tournament of Books rolls along with a few first round upsets (Congratulations, Sarvas!), but the highlight thus far might be a glimpse of Junot Díaz’s one-of-kind victor’s shirt from last year.Meanwhile, Stop Smiling offers up a Díaz interview.John Leonard’s son compiles a concordance to his father’s vigorous criticism, in which “thug,” “libidinal,” and “linoleum” make the top 10.The breathless inventorying of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous papers continues.Our friend Eliza Barclay reports from the Andes, finding little cause for optimism.Victor Lavalle becomes the most recent essayist spurred to eloquence by the Obama inauguration.Also from the Atlantic, Hitchens and Marx: On again?James Wood and Claire Messud get grilled – sort of – by The Harvard Crimson: he’s the chef, she does laundry.The people who put William Kristol on payroll show themselves capable of good judgment. Congratulations, Ross Douthat!Wikipedia find of the week: beghilos (aka calculator spelling)Audrey Niffeneger is not feeling the recession. The NYT says $5 mil for The Time Traveler’s Wife follow-up.NPR explores the doodles of powerful people.CAAF spends some time with the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus and pauses on “limn.”Clay Shirky elucidates, perhaps better than most media pundits have, why newspapers need to be “thinking the unthinkable.”
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