At The New York Times, Stanley Fish on True Grit as “a truly religious movie” in its understanding of the Christian idea of grace.
Grit & Grace
Sustainable Olympics
Year in Reading alumna Nell Zink writes on the future of global sport. As she puts it, "Under my plan for reform, the Olympics will no longer be assigned a fixed geographic location."
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Saturday Fiction with Faber and Gay
You can listen to stories by Michel Faber and Roxane Gay over at WNYC’s website. Gay’s piece, which is performed by Adepero Oduye, was recently selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories.
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David Simon Working on a Pogues Musical
The Wire creator David Simon is at work on a Pogues musical, reports Rolling Stone. Where will they possibly find a Broadway star with the right teeth to play Shane MacGowan?
Warm Ups
As you might have heard, the tenth annual Morning News Tournament of Books will commence this Thursday, and to kick things off, the site held a pre-Tournament playoff round. In it, Lev Grossman and David Gutowski (aka Largehearted Boy) try to predict what Geraldine Brooks will choose as her novel of the year. (Our own Lydia Kiesling takes part on the 18th.)
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Stories Are Clumsy Beasts
Over at ZYZZYVA, Christian Kiefer talks to playwright Octavio Solis and novelist Scott Hutchins about the craft of writing and the difference between writing plays and writing novels. “It takes a huge amount of hard labor, man, to harness the forces that we are using to make our stories. They may emerge whole cloth out of our need to know how we operate as humans, but they’re often clumsy unfinished beasts." Kiefer’s new novel, The Animals, is one of the most anticipated books of 2015.
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“I’m going out on this adventure”
“The idea was that whatever I felt or did resonated in life, caused people pain or happiness. This gave me a feeling of huge responsibility even as a child – to the extent that sometimes I had to block my own feelings or wishes. When I started writing fiction, suddenly I was allowed to do what I wanted.” Talking with Etgar Keret.
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