Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken, discusses her life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. “I’m looking for a way out of here. I can’t have it physically, so I’m going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination.”
Laura Hillenbrand
A Short History of the Executioner
In her short history of executioners, Stassa Edwards notes that the decision to replace “the traditional punishment” of drowning people “in a sack in a local river” was actually quite pragmatic: it was “more economical” to go with a simple beheading.
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A Reading and Conversation with Four Great Writers
For writers, and readers, who aren’t making the annual pilgrimage to AWP, The Millions and Big Other join forces this weekend to offer a NYC alternative, A Reading and Conversation with Four Great Writers: Vijay Seshardi, Rachel B. Glaser, Alexandra Chasin, and (our very own) Sonya Chung. At Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on Saturday, starting at 5pm. Drinks will be served. Please Join Us!
A Curious Win
The Olivier Awards (aka the London Tonys) went down last night, and a certain theatrical adaptation won a record seven awards. The book that inspired that adaptation? The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
Let’s Get 1,000 Feet on War And Peace
Jason Novak, brilliant penman behind last month’s brilliant Panorama of Middlemarch, has followed up that effort with an equally impressive Panorama of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
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Help Put Books in the Hands of NYC Kids
ReadThis and The Center for Fiction are throwing a day-long event featuring the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Rick Moody, Kurt Andersen, Sam Lipsyte, and Jamaica Kincaid. It’s taking place at 17 East 47th Street in Manhattan on Saturday April 10th. “The price of admission? Your donation of two or more new or gently used board books through grade 12.”
Get Shorty
Want your writing to have punch? Want your readers to believe you? “The five-word sentence as the gospel truth…Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence,” Roy Peter Clark writes in The New York Times. Sorry that every sentence in this post is more than five words.
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Fire It Up
Michael B. Jordan was tapped to play Montag in HBO’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The project, which will also star Michael Shannon as Beatty, is currently under development. (Bonus: Tanjil Rashid on “Bradbury’s Middle East Connection“)
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Back for More
Last week, I mentioned Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes, which caused a stir in Germany with its tale of a time-hopping Hitler. Now, Daniel Torday reviews the book for the Times, judging it both for its historical research and its merits as a work of fiction. Sample quote: “The German public’s acceptance of the artist they think they’re watching provides a critique of pop culture. But it feels like bringing the Luftwaffe to a knife fight.”