If you enjoyed David Auerbach‘s piece on Thomas M. Disch, we recommend you check out this overdue profile of Samuel R. Delany, whose magnum opus, Dhalgren, truly is “like Gertrude Stein: Beyond Thunderdome.”
The Modernist Master of Sci-Fi?
Hunter S. Thompson’s Job Application
From Hunter S. Thompson’s 1958 job application to the Vancouver Sun: “And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you. I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham.”
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Shatzkin on Digital Revolution
“The book business is a cork floating on a digital device stream,” writes Mike Shatzkin. Is publishing living “in a world not of its own making?”
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New York City Reading
This week in infographics: Epic Reads has created a Book Nerd’s Guide to New York City, complete with books set in the city, bookstores, reading spots, and authors who call the city home. Pair with The Millions’s walking tour of New York’s independent bookstores.
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Letters to a Young Writer
Over at the Story Prize blog, Year in Reading alumnus Colum McCann shares a letter of advice to writers starting their career. As he puts it, “A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last… [it] reveal[s] a truth that isn’t yet there.”
Where’s Atticus When You Need Him?
Mark Seal explores the ongoing legal battle between Harper Lee and Samuel L. Pinkus, the latter of whom is said to have “’engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,’ and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled.”
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Rock the Vote
Well, that’s one way to get the youth involved in politics. According to this piece over at The Daily Beast, “Before Tinder, before shopping malls, drive-ins, or speak-easies, young people searched for a place to meet and flirt. In 19th century America, wild political rallies offered the perfect opportunity.”
Mai Al-Nakib and the Power of Not Belonging
Mai Al-Nakib discusses her novel, An Unlasting Home, a family saga that follows generations of women across Kuwait, the U.S., and India.
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I still have my dog-eared first printing of Dhalgren. The experience of reading it and Gravity’s Rainbow are quite similar. They were both published in the early-to-mid ’70s — maybe there was something in the water.