“In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled… When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf?” Hilary Mantel writes a diary on hospitalization for the London Review of Books.
Hilary Mantel’s Hospital Diary
It Doesn’t End on Tuesday, Either
Yesterday was Fat Tuesday down in New Orleans, and if you missed the action down there, you can certainly get a taste of the local flavor by reading Rick Bragg’s 1997 piece in The New York Times, “New Orleans Doesn’t Wait for Friday.” (via)
One Kind of Coating
At Bookforum, Gee Henry talks with New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, whose new collection of essays, White Girls, tackles subjects including Eminem, Truman Capote and Gone with the Wind. The writer also delves into his affection for André Leon Talley.
Tuesday New Release Day: Elkin; Febos; Cottom; Butler; Mehta; Buchanan; O’Connell
Out this week: Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin; Abandon Me by Melissa Febos; Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom; Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; No Other World by Rahul Mehta; Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan; and To Be a Machine by our own Mark O’Connell (who we interviewed recently). For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Come Out and Party with The Rumpus
New Yorkers: tonight you can party with the likes of Sam Lipsyte, Colson Whitehead, Amber Tamblyn, Andrew McCarthy, Nato Green, Nick Flynn, Janine Brito, K. Flay and a whole bunch of the writers for The Rumpus. All it takes is $10 at the door. Festivities begin at Brooklyn’s Public Assembly at 7pm. Details can be found here.
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More like Readit, ha ha.
Since writing a plea for a YouTube lit category in Fiction Circus (which we discussed on our Tumblr), Miracle Jones has built a Reddit thread for literary videos.
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Sandman is Back
Neil Gaiman is famous for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the number one reason is Sandman, the graphic novel series that won the author nineteen Eisner and six Harvey awards. Now, twenty-five years after publishing the first issue, Gaiman has written a prequel, named Overture.
Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.