Today at The Paris Review blog, Maud Newton talks to Philip Connors, author of Millions most-anticipated book Fire Season.
Maud Newton Talks to Philip Connors
Letters to a Young Writer
Over at the Story Prize blog, Year in Reading alumnus Colum McCann shares a letter of advice to writers starting their career. As he puts it, “A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last... [it] reveal[s] a truth that isn't yet there.”
●
●
The Silent History
The Silent History is being billed as a “new kind of novel.” Readers download a free app for their iOS devices and, over a period of six months, the app will deliver brief, serialized installments of an “exploratory novel.” Certain features of the story depend on your geographic location, and readers also have the opportunity to contribute their own features. For a full primer, as well as interview with Eli Horowitz, one of the “key figures” behind the idea, head over to VQR’s website.
Profanity in Book Titles
Out this week is Marcy Roznick's If You Give a Kid a Cookie, Will He Shut the ---- Up?, a parody aimed at adults of the 1985 children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie... What's up with all the profanity in book titles lately?
●
●
Bulletproof
"When a female politician’s worst crime is to be unlikeable and uncompassionate, how much rationality and coldness is acceptable for women intellectuals and artists? Just how tough is tough enough?"
●
●
Bad Boys
“An ambidextrous cardsharp, who took losing as a personal insult; a proletarian agitator, who dressed like a dandy; a germ-fearing hypochondriac, smoking 100 cigarettes a day; a lady-killer with rotten teeth, causing a string of abortions wherever he went.” On the Soviet poet Mayakovksy.
Twi-Hard
At The Daily Beast, a bounty of Twilight-iana, including an interview with New Moon director Chris Weitz (aka the man who ruined The Golden Compass) and pictures of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson et al before Twilight.
●
●
The Sound of Anathema
“Some psychiatrists say that music has therapeutic powers and can even restore fluidity and mental structure for a moment in some patients – music is the opposite of chaos. It may be that heavy metal, the music his parents blamed in part for this entire catastrophe, is the only thing that gives order to my cousin’s worn-out brain. No one knows, except him.” On trying to seek refuge from schizophrenia in heavy metal.
●
●