It’s hard to believe that the country containing Aokigahara, or “The Suicide Forest”, has for so long ignored its abundance of clinically depressed, “overworked” citizens, but Junko Kitanaka, in her book Depression in Japan, explains exactly why that’s happened.
Japan’s “National Disease”
B Is for Bigotry
“I mostly find it sad. I understand that super religious people would not be there supporting it, but to go the extra mile to fight it when you could just not come kinda shocked me!” The Huffington Post reports on Brandon James, a drag performer whose plans to read to kids about acceptance at a North Carolina public library were scuttled after some of its patrons complained. We suppose the march of progress is never neat (via Book Riot).
Envy
Robert Birnbaum asked seven indie publishers to say which titles they wish they’d published in 2009. The last sentence of the piece (from Dalkey Archive’s Martin Riker) is particularly great.
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Writing the Suburban Wild
In a longform piece for The Atlantic Diane Saverin writes about Annie Dillard‘s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the predominantly male tradition of wilderness-writing, and how Dillard found and wrote about the wild while living in suburbia. She also wrestles with the question: “if the author conveys a resonant truth, does it matter what experiences led to the realizations?”
Fate and Fiction
Recommended reading: Catherine Lacey writes for Granta about “The Question of Fate” and fiction writing.
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What Do Essay Prompts Mean to You?
You may have heard that Tufts University’s latest application forms use the term YOLO in one of their essay prompts. Herewith, a few more essay prompts, courtesy of Stacy Brook at The Hairpin.