Revisiting Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen and what constitutes as an acceptable author bio.
Revisiting Vanessa Veselka
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More Illusions
Recommended Listening: Brad Listi’s interview with The Last Illusion author and Millions contributor Porochista Khakpour.
Where You From?
Last semester, at UC Riverside, the novelist Susan Straight began the class “Mixed-Race Literature and the American Experience” with a simple question: “How many of you are often asked, What are you?” In an essay about the class, she relates what they learned, which includes the observation that hair is weirdly important in America. (Related: The Millions published an essay by Straight on Toni Morrison’s Sula.)
Convention for the Bookish
Miss this year’s AWP? The New Yorker has published a brief write-up of the conference, just to make you jealous.
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A Model of Quiet Dissent
“Born Guan Moye, he chose his pen name—“Don’t Talk”—to honor his mother’s caution against talking too much and in sardonic recognition of his failure to heed her warning. Yet I have been struck by his quiet and unassuming presence at literary conferences in Beijing, where he offered kind encouragement in private meetings but evinced a shy persona in public.” On the contradictions of last year’s Nobel laureate, Mo Yan.
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“Trying to save Brooklyn”
At Salon, an interview with Year in Reading alum Gary Shteyngart, whose new memoir, Little Failure, came out last week. Shteyngart talks about the rise of a new “global fiction” and laments the fact that Russia “can’t seem to catch a break.”
The 2016 International Dublin Literary Award Longlist
This morning, the longlist for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award came out, and the nominees include some familiar names. Year in Reading alumnus Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (which won this year’s Pulitzer, whom you can learn more about in this essay by our own Michael Bourne) is on there, as is Year in Reading alumnus Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen, Year in Reading alumna Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (reviewed here by Aboubacar Ndiaye), and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (winner of this year’s Booker Prize).
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