N+1’s Marco Roth turns in an ambitious and historically nuanced exploration of white grievance in a putatively postracial America. Highly recommended.
Sarah Palin, White Goddess
The Extreme Edge of Experience
Year in Reading alumna Sarah Manguso writes about motherhood, writing, and the disintegration of the self in a moving essay for Harper’s. As she puts it, “I want to read books that were written in desperation, by people who are disturbed and overtaxed, who balance on the extreme edge of experience. I want to read books by people who are acutely aware that death is coming and that abiding love is our last resort.” Pair with Jaime Green’s Millions review of Manguso’s Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.
Now Those Are Some Good Ribs
The By the Book series at the Times has produced some pretty great entries, but we have a feeling that Colson Whitehead may go down as its best interviewee. Why do we say this? Well, it might have something to do with his weeping fit in a Chelsea Dallas BBQ, prompted by an early scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
●
●
Video Interview with Dar Williams and Spencer Reece
At Bloom this week, check out the multi–part feature on Spencer Reece‘s poetry project at an orphanage in Honduras, which includes a documentary film for which singer-songwriter Dar Williams is composing/performing the soundtrack. Watch an exclusive two-part video interview with Reece and Williams about their friendship and collaboration.
Short Circuit Reading
Do you ever find yourself skimming novels looking for exciting words and hyperlinks? You aren’t the only one mixing up the digital and print reading worlds. Neuroscientists believe we are developing new brain circuits for skimming online information that are rewiring how we’ve approached reading for centuries. Pair with: Our essay on how writing is also changing to fit our fragmented attention span.
●
●
Pinckney and Smith from the NYPL
●
●
Little Emotions in the Person
Recommended Reading: On Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and the art of hiding one’s feelings — whether helpful or detrimental.
●
●
All That We Love
“Maybe I [felt] a shift in responsibility when I had kids. I wanted the work I was doing, whatever it was, to be something that could be meaningful to them one day. That’s where the germ of the memoir came from. I thought that perhaps writing about my parents and where I came from would one day be helpful for my kids.” For Guernica, Christopher Kondrich interviews Tracy K. Smith about writing a memoir, the presence of David Bowie in her Life on Mars, and her reverence for the cosmic. Also check out Sophia Nguyen’s Millions review of Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light.
What your next-beach-umbrella neighbor is reading
Yes, but what’s everyone else reading this summer? Bookstores in beach towns know better than to stock “business, personal finance, or diet” books–though poetry does pretty well–but they are looking forward to these bestsellers. The print-disinclined can take heart that there are even a fair number of literary movies coming out soon. (Related: our own recommended summer reading list, also blessedly personal finance-free.)