“That’s Just My Life and It Seems Quite Normal to Me.”
The Twin Wins the IMPAC
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced its winner: Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin. The book was previously on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist. See Also: The IMPAC longlist and shortlist.
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Get Inspired
Cristine Brache curated a great list of web-poetry videos for last month’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, and she was awesome enough to post the entire playlist online for all to see.
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Don’t Assume
“I asked myself – why don’t I state the race of my characters? And am I doing something wrong by not explicitly including a diverse cast of characters? Could I be doing something better? The short answer is yes.” An argument in favor of race bent fanfiction and resisting assumedly white characters from The Missouri Review blog.
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“This is my song, for real / Do doubt.”
Andrew Marantz reviews R. Kelly’s “breezy” and “revealing” memoir, Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, for The New Yorker’s book blog, Page-Turner. This might be what they meant when they said they were “rebooting” the Book Bench. (Related: hear Gary Oldman read some passages from the book.)
Hard Time
One of the more common questions that comes up in The Nervous Breakdown’s self-interviews is what the subjects consider to be the hardest part of the writing life. The most recent edition sees Jac Jemc, whose latest came out last week, admit that time is what foils her: “Everything takes longer than I think it will, more drafts than I think it will.” This might be a good time to look back on some earlier examples of the form.
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