Still don’t have a job? Friday’s Jobs Report shows structural unemployment is the real problem.
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Contemporary Arabic Novels
Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about the contemporary Arabic novel in this week’s New Yorker, highlighting Iraqi, Palestinian, and Egyptian examples.
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New Release Tuesday
New on shelves this week is John Banville’s The Infinities. Also just out is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. (See our early look at the book, our two–part interview with Shields, and Shields’ Year in Reading.)
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“Yesterday / Is two days before tomorrow”
Recommended Reading: “Yesterday,” Haruki Murakami’s new piece in The New Yorker. (I’ll give you one guess to name the band it’s about.) And speaking of Murakami, his latest novel has an official book trailer now.
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A Cure for Writer’s Block
“Don’t discount the two greatest cures for [writer’s] Block: plagiarism and suicide.” Joshua Cohen dispenses some curious advice to writers at Ask the Paris Review.
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“I wanted to write about the feeling of life. Not life as an intellectual process, or a concept, but as a feeling.”
Tom Murphy, arguably Ireland’s greatest living playwright, joins The Paris Review for an interview about his life, his influences, and his rage.
Lucy Scholes on the Controlled Elegance of Edith Templeton
Lucy Scholes takes a closer look at the early novels of Edith Templeton, in which inflexible matriarchal figures are cast against society's expectations.
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Poetry Reviews: What for?
Ahead of National Poetry Month, Publishers Weekly Poetry Reviews Editor Craig Morgan Teicher asks and answers the questions many have contemplated: “What is accomplished by poetry reviews? Do they help sell books? Do they keep the art form in line? Do they spur writers into creating better poetry or kick bad writers out of the halls of Parnassus? Do poetry reviews help readers?”
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Becoming a Better Writer by… Not Writing?
Julia Fierro is a writer we’ve featured before, and her first novel Cutting Teeth was published last month. But as she explains in a new piece, there was a stretch of time when she didn’t write at all. “I was so cruel to myself, so impatient, beating myself up daily for not writing,” she says. “It took seven years worth of teaching… before I returned to writing with solid commitment. And when I did sit down in front of my computer, I was a better writer.”
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