When The Flock Changed
East of Here
Recommended Reading: This interview with the director of the National Steinbeck Center.
Remembering Ray Bradbury
A moving tribute to Ray Bradbury on The Paris Review Daily from his one time fact checker Stephen Andrew Hiltner: "Ray Bradbury, who never went to college and was entirely library educated, had what so many of the sophisticated, MFA-carrying writers today lack: passion, vitality, emotional awareness." Also: Wired has collected a bunch of reminiscences from science fiction writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin.
Weather Permitting
What can you do with all the snow? Shelley Jackson is making stories out of it. The artist is writing a story entirely in snow. You can read the first 200 words of her tale on her Flickr. It begins, "To approach snow too closely is to forget what it is..."
Oratory Passion
The best Fourth of July speech? Frederick Douglass delivered it on July 5, 1852. Pair with a reading list for July.
Convincing Reconstructions
“Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind.” On the role of realist historical fictions.
●
●
“Best Speech on the Future of Books & Publishing”
Richard Nash's keynote at Booknet Canada: it's not about "getting published" it's about "happiness," which is about "connecting." Chris Anderson of Wired tweeted, "Best speech on the future of books and publishing I've ever seen."
FSG’s New Online Literary Periodical
FSG just launched their new online literary periodical, Work in Progress. Check out their debut issue, where you’ll find Jeffrey Eugenides chatting about his latest book with Jonathan Galassi, fiction by Lydia Davis, summer book giveaways and photos from the FSG archives. Look for the clip from an FSG letter introducing Susan Sontag’s first book in 1963: “It is difficult, as you know, to create interest in new writers.”
●
●