I highly recommend reading Jennifer Gilmore’s emotional essay on meeting “the birth mother.”
“I have a lot of feelings about the meeting.”
Ever Read a Posthumous Interview?
“I certainly didn’t want to do something that felt as if I was having a séance. I started with her most personal papers. I wanted her interior voice; I didn’t want the formal writing. I went immediately to her diaries and letters and to the commonplace books. From there I started looking at the marginalia because I was getting a sense of wanting to know what was on her mind while she was writing in her journals.” Lynell George conducted a posthumous interview with Octavia Butler, Bomb magazine talked to her about the process. Pair it with this essay on slavery in fiction from our own Edan Lepucki.
Don’t Look at Me
If you go up to the Internet at a party and say hi, don’t feel offended if it scowls and turns away. The truth is, the Internet just has a thing for introverts.
Wood and Krasznahorkai in Conversation
The latest installment of Housing Works Bookstore Café’s biweekly podcast features a conversation between James Wood and László Krasznahorkai. (We interviewed him for our site last year, too.) The Hungarian author’s next book, Seiobo There Below, was highlighted in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.