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 Public Private Experience
“[S]he and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.” The Guardian runs ‘A Private Experience,’ a short story from Year-in-Reading alum Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The Other Down Under
This week saw the release of The Jaguar’s Children, a novel set on the Mexican border that draws on author John Vaillant’s experience in his wife’s home state of Arizona. At The Walrus, Sasha Chapman provides more background on Vaillant in her review of the book, which notes the importance of jaguars in Mexican symbology.
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From Isolation to Affluence
“It’s likely Lucia would have felt more comfortable watching a bull be gored in a Mexico City arena or huddling among winos on a corner in Oakland than she ever felt at her first place on posh Mapleton Hill.” Elizabeth Geoghegan for The Paris Review on Lucia Berlin, whose A Manual For Cleaning Women is out now.
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Frankenstein Survives
The Bodleian Library has digitized Mary Shelley’s notebooks containing Frankenstein.
Catlin Seaview Survey
One of my favorite Google Easter Eggs was the (now removed) instruction to “swim across the Atlantic Ocean” in order to get from New York to London. Today, however, that joke seems prophetic. Google, in conjunction with The University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, has created the Catlin Seaview Survey or, in other words, “an underwater variant of the Google Street View service.”
“Well most people don’t go to the Olympics!”
Millions alumna Rachel Hurn had the honor of interviewing Swimming Studies author Leanne Sharpton for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Emerging Writer’s Contest
The Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest ends on May 15th! Check out the guidelines to find out more about how you can be published in the literary journal (and win a nice chunk of change).
Big Bird Is Still Employed
Still mourning the end of 2012 Election jokes? The Poetry Foundation is here to help with “Binders Full of Poems by Women.”