As stated on his website, you can now read the first section of Colson Whitehead‘s forthcoming Zone One. (Scribd). The book will release this October, and it was tapped in our “Great Second Half of 2011 Book Preview.”
Zone One Excerpt
Return to Sender
“A woman I did not know called me to help her with something I have always loved to do: write. Certainly it was fate, my involvement destined to be a seed for a fairy tale ending, I thought. I was wrong,” Scott Saalman writes about the moral challenges of agreeing to help someone with their writing at The Morning News.
Type Writer Fetish
Want to make your writing more dramatic? Try using a typewriter. Tom Hanks professes his love for typewriters in The New York Times. “Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece,” he writes. Pair with: A St. Louis man placed typewriters around the city in hopes that residents will share their stories.
Out of the Frying Pan
The Kindle edition of one of our Most Anticipated Books is on sale at $1.99. Our Man in Iraq, a novel by Robert Perišic, follows two Croatian cousins who manage to get caught up in the frenzy of the Iraq War. You can find out more in John Feffer’s interview with Perišic. (h/t Buzz Poole)
Raised on B-Movies
I’ve loved old sci-fi B-movies forever, and a staggering number of my childhood memories involve Ray Harryhausen. For this reason, I’m really geeking out over The New Yorker’s entire science fiction issue, but in particular this piece by Colson Whitehead deserves your time.