Maybe the real reason I like Jennifer Egan is that there are so many freckled protagonists in her books. Patricia Zohn at the Huffington Post asks the author about her family, parenting, and her writing obsessions (like freckled faces). She even gets a photo of Egan as a teenager!
Jennifer Egan at 15
Lux Fiat
“Language is more direct, open, unself-conscious, precise, and human. It doesn’t belong to me anymore but to the atmosphere, and this makes me happy.” Henri Cole on having his poetry projected onto buildings by Jenny Holzer.
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Paging Hilla Becher
Recommended Reading: These fifteen short texts in search of Hilla Becher, photographer and life/artistic partner of Bernd Becher: “One of the creations of her and Bernd’s artistic partnership was the seemingly perfect fusion of their visions. ‘No, there is no division of labor,’ they told an interviewer in 1989, in a conversation that pointedly doesn’t designate which of them is speaking. ‘Outsiders cannot tell who has taken a particular photo and we also often forget ourselves. It simply is not important.'”
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“Characters are Ciphers”
Peter Mendelsund writes for the Paris Review about how we see, or think we see, fictional characters. “Characters are ciphers. … We are ever reviewing and reconsidering our mental portraits of characters in novels: amending them, backtracking to check on them, updating them when new information arises.”
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Fighting for Space
Recommended Reading: London’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted. Broadly spoke to some of the women who are taking to the streets to save the space.
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“Loving” to Read
“We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?” Joshua Rothman on “The History of ‘Loving’ to Read.”
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How Writers Read Vol. 2
I’ve written before about The Believer‘s “How Writers Read” series, and now the second installment, which includes questions about guilty reading and the constant debate between short and long books, is online.
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