Here’s a great article about the underrated Soviet/Yiddish writer Pinkhes “Der Nister” Kaganovich.
“Der Nister”
Sedaris by the Sea
Recommended Reading: David Sedaris’s essay about his sister Tiffany’s suicide, “Now We Are Five,” for The New Yorker. “How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.”
Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me).
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door author Etgar Keret shares “Ten Rules for Writers” with Rookie.
Before the Fall
Calling a book “the spiritual prequel to The Road” is a great way to signal its command of dystopian tropes. It’s what Gabe Durham wrote about Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s recent YA novel Echo of the Boom. At The Rumpus, Durham interviews Neely-Cohen, who describes how he tried to give a metafictional bent to the novel. Related: we asked high school students to pick their favorite YA books of 2013.
Linguistics
Leave it to the Oxford English Dictionary folks to put a damper on the linsane amount of eponyms based on Jeremy Lin’s surname.
Weather Permitting
What can you do with all the snow? Shelley Jackson is making stories out of it. The artist is writing a story entirely in snow. You can read the first 200 words of her tale on her Flickr. It begins, “To approach snow too closely is to forget what it is…”