Lev Grossman offers some words of encouragement for aspiring writers: “because it turns out that talent, whatever that is, and that glowy aura, are only part of the picture.”
Lev Grossman on Aspiring Writers
Harper Lee’s Letters
Even though Harper Lee hasn’t given an interview in 50 years, her letters are an insight into the notoriously reclusive writer.”I simply don’t give interviews, because it takes great skill to ask meaningful questions and very few people in the media have it,” she wrote in a 2005 letter. Two of Lee’s letters will be auctioned today and are expected to go for at least $2,500 a piece. Pair with: Our essay on reclusive authors.
High Expectations
“My sense, though, was that he was a very complicated man. He could enter a room and be the organizer of games and magic tricks and funny stories and a brilliant mimic and holding forth and entertaining and holding the center. But he was also incredibly controlling; he was domineering.” Ralph Fiennes on playing Charles Dickens.
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“Medvedev is Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer”
n+1 posted the introduction Keith Gessen wrote for Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good poetry and essay collection, which Gessen translated along with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich.
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An Engine, An Engine
“It is a superstitious business—childish, really—the marking, or even the noticing, of anniversaries like these. Such fastening pretends that one day can be like another, pretends that every day is not, ultimately, only its own day, the only version of itself that will ever come. But ‘Daddy’ is itself a poem built on a bedrock of anniversaries.” At The Paris Review Daily, Belinda McKeon marks the birthday of an oft-revered poem.
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“The serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader”
Though everyone is tired of the online critics are too nice/ do critics even matter debate cropping up everywhere as of late, Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Critic’s Manifesto” may be the best thing to come out of the conversation yet: a clear formulation of what it means to be a critic and why that matters.
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The Coming-of-Age Stories That Made Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders discusses the coming-of-age stories that shaped her award-winning science fiction and helped her confront the world in front of her.
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Bodies in Public
Édouard Louis discusses his third book, Who Killed My Father, as well as violence, poverty, and the gilets jaunes movement.
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