Paper or plastic? Hey, you with the Kindle! Stop looking so smug… E-books aren’t as green as you think.
Paper or Plastic?
Significant Thinking
"Over the course of our conversation, I’ve come to understand that he has not written (Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings) to provoke or to engender a self-serving sense of shock; he has written with a belief in the possibilities of liminal space and in the revelations that occur at the point of tension. The result is a book that jars, unequivocally, and that disquietingly brings to the surface the anguish of past and present America." Stephen O'Connor's poetic reimagining of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings has certainly raised some eyebrows. This interview with Melody Nixon at BOMB gives O'Connor a platform from which to explain his idea.
Housing Crisis: Solved
Can’t afford a house? Print one.
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The Great Terry Castle
"Much of what passes for advanced literary scholarship these days is dreadful twaddle -- incoherent, emotionally empty, deeply illiterate," says Terry Castle in a recent interview with Salon about her new book of essays, The Professor. You can also catch Castle in the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine.
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Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus
Recommended Reading: Ben Marcus's short story "Leaving the Sea" in the current issue of Tin House.
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Billy Pilgrim Is Unstuck
"How can a horrific event, so monstrous it seems incomprehensible, be told? How does one even find the words to write about it?" For The Paris Review, Matteo Pericoli takes a look at Slaughterhouse-Five and the bridge between fiction and architecture.
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Failure
"I’ve learned that people—writers and non-writers alike—don’t like that word. Failure.... I take a bizarre pleasure, now, in using that word. Maybe because during my decade as a failed writer, the one thing that took the edge off was wallowing in that failure—carefully, in a proscribed fashion, like having a drink when you’re still hungover." Stephanie Feldman writes for Vol. 1 Brooklyn about being a literary failure, about the two books she wrote and never published, and about the one she finally did. Pair with the stories of these 5 writers and their failed "novels in drawers."
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