Susan Orlean’s Obsessions

What's the one question you should never ask a writer starting a new book: how's the writing going? "Nothing can damage a novel in embryo as quickly and effectively as trying to describe it before it’s ready," Mark Slouka writes. Follow his advice for how to keep your writer friends.

Among the better Tumblr memes is Read to Me Tuesday, which is exactly what it sounds like:  people choose a passage from a book, call in and read the passage over the phone.  The resulting posts are compiled under the hashtag #RTMT and often re-blogged by rtmt.tumblr.com.  As we see increased interest in social reading experiments like bookglutton.com,  RTMT shows how the web might make social connection through reading aloud a possibility for the first time since, well, story time.  Plus it's really, really fun.

"The home I grew up in will never exist again, and this is why I write so much about home, perhaps. Because I lost mine," Jesmyn Ward told Roxane Gay in an interview for The Toast. They discussed Ward's new memoir, Men We Reaped, her writing process, and how she deals with being labeled a "black woman writer."

Year In Reading contributor and The End of Oulipo author Scott Esposito has been reading a lot of William Gaddis’s letters recently. Over at his blog, he’s shared his favorite ten passages from Gaddis’s collected correspondence.