Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers (which our own Mark O’Connell reviewed last October), expected Harry Mathews’ novel The Journalist to be a “terrible flop,” but soon found it was “every bit as great as Mathews’ more celebrated novels.”
From Flop to Top
Maman Called Today
“If to live is to suffer, and surviving is to find meaning in the suffering, does this explain why I have to spend precious time and money at work happy hours?” Existentialism for Millennials.
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Avian Days
Buying a hawk isn’t the most common grief-coping mechanism, but it worked for Helen Macdonald, who purchased a predatory bird not long after her father passed away. Her new book, H is for Hawk, deals with the experience, in addition to being a falconry manual of sorts. At The Globe and Mail, an interview with the author.
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Why Read Moby Dick?
Nathaniel Philbrick answers the question Why Read Moby-Dick: “the level of the language is like no other,” but also “it’s as close to being our American Bible as we have.”
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Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award Winners Announced
For the past 17 years, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award has celebrated “six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers.” This year’s winners are Melanie Diane (poetry), Apricot Irving (nonfiction), Fowzia Karimi (fiction), Namwali Serpell (fiction), Merritt Tierce (fiction), and JoAnn Wypijewski (nonfiction). They will accept their awards on September 22 in New York City.
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“I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm”
In 1998, not long after publishing his first novel, Dan Brown paid a visit to an English class at Phillips Exeter. Among the students in attendance that day was future New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose fragmented recollection of Brown’s appearance turned into an instructive tale about “memory and its tricks.”
Weather Advisory
“These are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death.” Over at Ploughshares, E.V. De Cleyre considers the weather in contemporary literature.
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