If you’re going to be at AWP, check out the Flatmancrooked and Mud Luscious Press “Author vs. Puppet” reading (and, yes, puppet show). I’ll be reading/puppeteering, as will novella writers Emma Straub and Alyssa Knickerbocker, among others. The fun starts at the Flatmancrooked booth on Friday at 4 pm!
AWP Madness
DFW a Year Later
David Foster Wallace died a little more than a year ago. It’s a good time to revisit Garth’s excellent piece written shortly after Wallace’s death. More recently, No Pun Intended published a long reflection on Wallace.
Only Connect
Recommended Reading: Anything that Vivian Gornick writes. Here’s an essay from The New York Times on how literature ages and rereading E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Our own Lydia Keisling also wrote a fantastic piece on the Forster classic.
The Harper Perennial Model
Harper Perennial is pairing the expansive resources of a major publishing house with the exciting risks of an indie press. Could this magical formula catch on at other houses?
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The Curse of the Diaeresis
Okay, so the deal with the famed and occasionally disdained New Yorker umlaut on words like “cooperate” is that it is not an umlaut, it is a diaeresis, and they’ll be holding onto it, thank you very much.
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Feminist Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is almost as famous for being sampled on Beyoncé’s latest album as she is for her novel Americanah. With that in mind, she discussed her writing process, hair blogs, and what feminism means to her in Elle. “It means that I am present in the world, and that I realize that there is a problem with the way we’ve constructed gender,” she said. For more Adichie, read her 2013 Year in Reading post.
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Keeping Present the Forgotten
Recommended reading: The Believer interviews Claudia Rankine about Citizen: An American Lyric, the relationship between art and literature and the importance of “keeping present the forgotten bodies.”
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