MFA vs. NYC?

"In no particular order, except one of hallelujah, here’s a necessarily partial list of some other living Korean American writers whose work or person, or both, I’ve had the great good luck of encountering"....you'll have to read the interview for the lengthy list as well as the thoughts of four Korean American writers who gathered at the behest of R.O. Kwon to discuss the influence and impact of Alexander Chee. It's full of beautiful insights from Kwon, Nicole Chung, Alice Sola Kim, and Matthew Salesses  such as "Alex said he 'wanted to plant that flag in the culture,' and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave". Chee's newest book is an essay collection, How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, that we eagerly anticipated last month.

On the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, The Literary Hub has a list of eight books by LGBTQ authors from places where it's illegal to be gay, including Here Comes the Sun by Year in Reading alum Nicole Dennis-Benn.

Out this week: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews; The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 5; Rocket and Lightship by Adam Kirsch; The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan Daum; and a single-volume edition of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.

The Atlantic discusses the link between science fiction and colonialism. “The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think.”