Radiohead can typically do no wrong in the eyes of fans and culture pundits, but author Ian Rankin describes how even these indie heroes got him stuck in customer service hell: ” no e-mail address; no phone line; no possibility of human contact.”
Oh No, Computer
Tuesday Means New Releases
Sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman sees her debut effort The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them hit shelves today. Also new today is Not Art by Peter Esterhazy who wowed Garth at PEN/World Voices in 2008.
Dr. Seuss Manuscript Surfaces
“All Sorts of Sports. Shall I play checkers? golf? croquet? There are so many games there are to play.” A never-before-seen Dr. Seuss manuscript, “All Sorts of Sports,” is up for auction. (via AuthorScoop)
Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
“Perhaps James Franco should just stick to acting.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Guy Fieri, as he read the New York Times’s review of James Franco’s photography exhibit. “Their review of my restaurant is no longer the most gleefully negative thing they’ve published.”
Picture Perfect
We pick photos to accompany writing all the time, but what do writers think about photography? At The New Yorker, photo editor Jessie Wender asked eight writers, from Jennifer Egan to Sasha Frere-Jones, what their favorite photographs are.
Writing as Profession
Writers can’t create original work without financial stability and a minimum amount of rest, writes Maggie Doherty in Dissent. Pair with Kate Angus’s Millions essay on making a living as a poet.
Scrutinizing Letters from Sylvia Plath
Anwen Crawford reflects on newly published letters from Sylvia Plath; “The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to ‘fully narrate her own autobiography,’ as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former. But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world.” In the New Yorker
A Letter from a Friend
Recommended Reading: Orrin Devinsky remembers his best friend, Oliver Sacks.