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…”