Anyone who travels a lot will enjoy Dubravka Ugresic‘s essay on hotel minibars. As a matter of fact, just about anyone will enjoy this essay regardless of how often they travel.
“Death to the Minibar!”
Big Papa Country
Brad Leithauser on being from “Hemingway country,” and Matt Pearce, on the impossibility of tweeting from there.
“What they are, what they should be”
Writing from the Self
Year in Reading alumnus Alexander Chee has a guide for writing an autobiographical novel. He writes, “The woods is your life. You are the axe.” Pair with this Millions piece in defense of autobiography.
DWF – Dating While Feminist
Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s new book Outdated: How Dating is Ruining Your Love Life starts a public conversation about the pitfalls of Dating While Feminist (DWF).
The New Great Books
“How can we represent four hundred years of American literary history in a way that doesn’t reinforce the unfortunate hierarchies of those four hundred years?” Year in Reading alum Rebecca Makkai writes for Electric Literature about the opening of the new American Writers Museum in Chicago and what it means to curate an historical canon of letters. See also: our interview with Makkai from a couple of years back.
A resolution
On the relative statuses of literary, mainstream, and genre fiction: a resolution. (From Stephanie Anderson, manager of WORD in Brooklyn.)