Southpaws unite! The LA Review of Books takes on left-handedness. Now, someone use this can opener for me.
The Left Coast On Lefties
“Every writer needs an editor”
"Every writer needs an editor, and anyone who says he doesn’t has a fool for a muse." The New York Times interviews journalists on the importance of editors, and it's well worth the short read. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki's conversation with her editor.
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To Essay
"For a while, shortly after I finished an undergraduate creative writing course, everything I wrote started with an observation or a realization...I was going to be an essayist, and it was going to be awesome." At The Morning News, Martin Connelly writes about how he lost his drive to become an essayist and the surprising thing that makes him want to start again — his daughter. For more on the power of the essay, read our interview with Leslie Jamison.
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The Many Lives of Yoram Kaniuk
“After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died.” Nicole Krauss remembers her relationship with Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, author of The Last Jew, in her obituary for The New Yorker.
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The Dungeon Master’s Workshop
Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, started his auspicious career in the most unlikely of imaginary places: crafting stories for his friends in the tabletop roleplay game Dungeons & Dragons.
“In matters like writing[…], a man does what he has to do—if he has to write, why then, he writes”
Rebecca Davis O'Brien unearths a letter in which Malcolm Cowley tackles the timeless question, "Should I get an MFA?" Just as poignant as Cowley's letter is novelist Helen DeWitt's pointed dismissal of Cowley's advice in the comments section.
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Pioneering Television
Make sure to set the DVR to C-SPAN2 this weekend because Konstantin Kakaes will be talking about our own e-book original The Pioneer Detectives at 7:30 p.m. EST on Sunday. Also, listen to Kakaes discuss what happens when scientists are faced with a discovery that challenges their fundamental beliefs in gravity on the New America Foundation podcast.
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