At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg talks with Jonathan Lethem about his new novel Chronic City “I love to dwell in the space of a novel — I don’t find writing uncomfortable, it’s something I really love doing. Writing a long novel, especially, it means that I’m creating this whole other set of people that I’m interested in, and this whole other world I get to go into, and I try to stay there. I try to go every day, not just to see the word count amass, which is helpful, but because then my subconscious is kind of living there.”
LA Times interviews Jonathan Lethem
Recession, Eh? Not Up Here
The oil boom occurring in North Dakota, Montana, and Canada's Bakken Formation is so frantic right now that ND's unemployment rate is only 3.4%, the lowest in the nation. "Hiring is so frantic," writes Business Week's Bryan Gruley, "the McDonald's in Dickinson [North Dakota] is offering $300 signing bonuses."
●
●
Unfamiliar Discourse
Recommended Reading: Je Banach on what literary discourse offers in an age of extremism. For Banach, literary discourse is "the language of our future because it is the language of confronting that which is foreign to us."
Truck Driver From the Waist Down
Recommended Reading: On the forgotten journalism of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee's forays into journalism included a 1,200-word profile of Officer Dewey, the lead investigator in the series of murders which were the focus of Truman Capote's seminal In Cold Blood, and another short profile of Capote himself for the newsletter of a Book of the Month Club which had selected In Cold Blood as its monthly read -- seriously.
●
●
Lost Hitchcock
A long lost Alfred Hitchcock film has been unearthed in New Zealand.