Photographer Lalage Snow photographed Scottish soldiers before, during, and after their deployments to Afghanistan. The photographs show “the toll that fighting … takes on our troops.”
The Faces of War
Global Fame for a Literary Icon
“She told the students not to explain too much, that they could throw in expressions in Igbo or Yoruba or pidgin and trust the reader to get it. She told them that even if a story was autobiographical it should be shaped—that, for instance, although in life you could have ten close friends, in fiction you could not, because it was too confusing. She told them to avoid inflated language—’never purchase when you can buy.'” A delightful (and somewhat rare) long profile of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker.
On Writing While Parenting
Having kids changes everything, of course, but for the writer, used to working in quiet solitude, it can feel like the end. Jessica Francis Kane writes about how she learned to write again, in a new way, after having children and offers some tips for new parents who write.
One With Others
“She was to me and so many poets an exemplary and inimitable figure. And I mean to emphasize the tension between ‘exemplary’ and ‘inimitable’—what her example taught us was the necessity of going our own way, of being one with others.” Ben Lerner remembers C.D. Wright, who passed away earlier this week.
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Jon Cotner’s Floating World
As part of the River to River Festival, poet Jon Cotner has put together a “floating world,” or a map of Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō’s work transposed onto Rockefeller Park. Each hour, Cotner will lead a tour through the world. This isn’t the first time Cotner’s done something cool like this, either. Check out our dispatch from his “Poem Forest” last year.
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P.T. Anderson Wants to Direct Pynchon Novel
Vulture reports that Paul Thomas Anderson wants to adapt Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel Inherent Vice for the big screen.
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Allies Respond
Writers John Keene, Dawn Martin Lundy, and others respond to the mass shooting in Orlando. “Homophobia, transphobia, and ideologically-nurtured hatreds of all kinds, coupled with semi-automatic weapons, provide the fuel for terror, in this case literally,” says Keene.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Strout; Jelloun; Chiarella; Ellis; Yapa; Miéville; Gurley; Berne; Black
New this week: My Name Is Lucy Barton by the Pulitzer laureate and Year in Reading alumna Elizabeth Strout; The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun; And Again by Jessica Chiarella; American Housewife by Helen Ellis; Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa; This Census-Taker by China Miéville; Eleanor by Jason Gurley; The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne; and Even the Dead by John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2016 Book Preview.
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