The Atlantic asks, “Why do cities matter?” In its own way, n+1‘s City by City series can be read as a response.
Cities
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a Library
Summer Brennan attempts the Marie Kondo approach to organizing her library and learns about the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
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Identity Crisis
Recommended Reading: Our own Ismail Muhammad on a new book of essays by Durga Chew-Bose.
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Collapsing Genre
“The clash of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. That’s how we ought to be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be “as valuable” as King Lear, we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance might collide.” Joshua Rothman writes about the coming “collapse of the genre system” and our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s National Book Award short-listed Station Eleven for The New Yorker.
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American Experience: Jesse Owens
The Summer Olympics begin in exactly one month, so I recommend checking out this 52-minute American Experience episode on Olympic legend Jesse Owens to set the tone.
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The Opposite of #AmWriting
Writing a novel is an all-consuming project, so can you imagine not telling anyone? At The New York Times, Alice Mattison discusses keeping her novels secrets until at least the third draft. “If I talk about the book, I believe — I cannot help believing — my characters will be angry, and will no longer confide in me about their embarrassing, troubled lives.” On another side of the secrecy spectrum, Emma Straub writes about what it’s like to keep a personal secret even as her literary life was booming.
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DARE, Hear Americans Talk
In 1965, researchers set out in campers to hear Americans talk. The Dictionary of American Regional English is a road trip of the mind. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
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