At the Hartford Advocate, Craig Fehrman talks to Rick Moody about his “perplexing” career and latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death: “Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation, but he is one of the most successful …”
Profile of Rick Moody
The First Family of Letters
Want to become a successful writer? Get adopted by Stephen King. With five fiction writers to their name — Stephen, Tabitha King, Joe Hill, Owen King, and his wife, Kelly Braffet — the Kings have turned writing into a family business, according to The New York Times Magazine profile on the clan. Pair with: the accompanying article on “Easter eggs” found in the family’s fiction.
The Limits of Good Taste
In his review of a collection of rejected New Yorker covers titled Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See, Jeet Heer details the magazine’s history of straddling the divide between bourgeoisie complacency and bohemian angst.
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Early Days
The story of how a publishing house began is the definition of literary inside baseball, but this piece by Jonathan Galassi — in which the FSG president responds to an upcoming book on the heyday of his company — does a pretty nice job of spurring a general reader’s interest. Among other things, it reveals that First Wife Dorothea Straus once called the company’s office “a sexual sewer.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Didion, Freud, Obreht
This week’s big book release is Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights. Also out is Esther Freud’s Lucky Break and new in paperback, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (our review).
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The Persistence of Memory
“How can we trust ourselves? Trust that our skills will return? Trust that this blank document—this one, right now—won’t be our undoing? The previous essay I wrote won’t save me when the blank document stares, and the deadline looms, and the editor lurks, and the readers wait.” Mensah Demary on writing and forgetting.
An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
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