David Ulin offers a brief consideration of Stephen King. King’s work, Ulin writes, “exposes, with real acuity, a lot about who we are.”
Ulin on King
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
The wonders of modern book packaging applied to some classic tomes. For example, 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss. (via)
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Kool As the Other Side of the Pillow
“If you lack a competent distributor down here, then consider me at your service. Nothing would make me happier than to drive Salems off the market for good and ever. It’s without a doubt the foulest cigarette in the history of tobacco-addicted man—a tasteless mish-mash of paper and dry weeds.” Boy, Hunter S. Thompson really hated Salems.
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Moving Beyond Mary Shelley
Rachel Feder considers why Mary Shelley is often credited as the "ingénue inventor of speculative fiction," while Margaret Cavendish remain relatively unknown.
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Up to Scratch
What’s better than being a writer? A writer who gets paid. Manjula Martin and Jane Friedman have launched the new digital magazine Scratch, which gives writers information on how to advocate for their work. The preview issue is free and contains essays on what freelancers can learn from street vendors, Cord Jefferson on outgrowing his materialism, and an interview with Jonathan Franzen. You can subscribe here.
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The Slow Cookers
Dwight Garner, writing in the current issue of The New York Times Magazine, laments that so many high-end American novelists seem to be working on “the nine-year plan,” delivering a new novel roughly once a decade. He cites Jeffrey Eugenides, who will be out soon with The Marriage Plot, his third novel in 18 years, along with such slow cookers as Jonathan Franzen, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon. One name Garner neglected to mention is the Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy, who will be out next month with Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, the eighth installment in his Albany cycle and his first novel since Roscoe appeared nine years and nine months ago. Look for our review of it here next month.
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