And now for something completely different, a book review of Shaq’s new memoir.
On a Different Note
There Is No End
"In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write." On writing and tenacity.
On the All-Nighter
If you’ve pulled an all-nighter, you understand the strange mental space that follows. Carmen Maria Machado brings us into that space at Catapult.
100 Days that Changed Canada
Denise Donlon writes on the day MuchMusic rocked the tube. Peter Mansbridge details when baseball player Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. And Conrad Black outlines a train trip by Canada’s first prime minister. Those are but a few of the essays by well-known Canadian personalities in the new book 100 Days That Changed Canada (HarperCollins Canada), now in stores.
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Submission Alert!
Heads up, writerly types! Dzanc Books is looking for submissions for their newly-announced 2016 Prize for Fiction. Judges Carmiel Banasky, Kim Church, and Andrew F. Sullivan will determine the winner, who is slated to receive publication and a not-so-insignificant $10,000 prize. Go get published.
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Up There
Northern England has its own distinct genre of crime fiction, yet it’s never taken off abroad the way its counterparts in Scandinavia and Scotland have. In The Guardian, AK Nawaz wonders why this is, arguing that “there is an argument for a common and marketable 'Northernness' - if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.”
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You Wouldn’t Understand
How do American high school cliques get their colorful names? At The Morning News, Michael Erard investigates.
Our Vampire Lit is Vintage
“Why, hello there! — I was just appraising some rare PDFs in the back room when I heard you come in. Feel free to peruse our inventory, and if you have any questions, please allow me—one of the world’s foremost authorities on and purveyors of fine electronic books—to act as your steward through the wonderfully esoteric world of antique eBook collecting.”
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