This Tuesday’s notable new releases include Ayelet Waldeman’s Red Hook Road, Laurence Gonzales’ Lucy and Tana French’s Faithful Place.
Tuesday New Release Day
Wimmer Discusses Forthcoming Bolaño
Scott Esposito interviews Natasha Wimmer, translator of 2666 and The Savage Detectives. They discuss some forthcoming additions to the ever expanding Bolaño oeuvre (which will be potential additions to a future edition of our Bolaño syllabus.)
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Write Fast
Tony Tulathimutte offers advice on lowering word count: Merge scenes, murder characters, quit writing altogether: “merge scenes, murder characters, ‘start as close to the end as possible’ (Kurt Vonnegut), quit writing altogether.” Pair with this Millions piece on writing slowly and by hand.
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Hard Time
One of the more common questions that comes up in The Nervous Breakdown’s self-interviews is what the subjects consider to be the hardest part of the writing life. The most recent edition sees Jac Jemc, whose latest came out last week, admit that time is what foils her: “Everything takes longer than I think it will, more drafts than I think it will.” This might be a good time to look back on some earlier examples of the form.
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Tips on Surviving Cancer
Rebecca Pederson’s Tips On Surviving Your Cancer: Make it your Facebook status, shave your head, obtain at least one TV series box set and one reliable barf bucket, and more on Hairpin.
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TLAN:WOTFOB Excerpted
Reif Larsen’s “The Crying of Page 45” appears in this month’s issue of The Believer. This clever, inventive essay is excerpted from the book I co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. You can get a taste of the piece at The Believer website, but the full essay in all its illustrated glory is available in the print magazine as well as in, of course, the book.
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Harper Lee’s Unsolved Mystery
In 1970, Harper Lee came to a small town to write about a crime that occurred there, a gruesome murder that was staged to look like a car accident.
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Letter from a Pulitizer Juror
Michael Cunningham, who alongside Maureen Corrigan and Susan Larson sat on the jury of the Pulitzer Prize for for fiction, gives the clearest account yet of how the award process works and defends the three shortlisted titles. His letter is in two parts, he also addresses the function of judgment and begins to build a poetics of literary greatness.