With the imminent release of The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp shares some personal memories of the late Hunter S. Thompson.
Depp on Thompson
Introducing Flannery O’Connor
Adrian Van Young at Electric Literature has compiled a reading primer for the works of Flannery O’Connor. Pair with Nick Rapatrazone’s Millions essay on teaching and learning from “the greatest American writer ever to load up a typewriter.”
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Writer-Collector
“I do not find it unusual that many writers I know acquire vintage clothes, buy old homes, and rescue animals. For one, we don’t have Wall Street salaries, and secondly, we’re suckers for backstory, particularly that which is left to the imagination. Our job, after all, is to make up lives, engage in epic games of pretend.” Megan Mayhew Bergman writes for Ploughshares about collecting cast-off objects, “the chaos of memories,” and becoming a writer. Pair with David L. Ulin‘s reflection on Bergman’s essay and the way we think about memory, written for the LA Times.
Sourcing ‘The Hobbit’
In an essay for The Guardian, John Garth identifies an interesting source for parts of Tolkien‘s The Hobbit: Native American lore.
What’s Wrong with a Readable Book?
There is a controversy brewing right now in Britain about readability and excellence in literature. Apparently, being “readable” is no longer a compliment.
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Tiny Worlds
Recommended Reading: On the great depth and detail of tiny worlds in Ploughshares. An example of these worlds, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories takes short fiction “to the extreme.”
Literary Graphic Novels
At Paste, eight literary works that deserve the graphic-novel treatment. (via AuthorScoop)
Tuesday New Release Day: Smiley; Wallace; Manzini; Meloy; Gizzi; Eliot; Knausgaard
Out this week: Ember Days by our own Nick Ripatrazone, Early Warning by Jane Smiley; Madam President by The View co-host Nicolle Wallace; Black Run by Antonio Manzini; Devotion by Maile Meloy; Collected Poems by Michael Gizzi; Volume 5 of The Letters of T.S. Eliot; and Book 4 of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
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“He’s like a Shakespeare.”
How do you “challenge Muslim stereotypes” in film? Add more white actors. The director of a biopic about 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hopes to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. star in the film.
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