A Nerdist podcast featuring Wil Wheaton and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in which Tweedy discusses his path to becoming a musician, how his kids like having “a rockstar for a dad,” and lets listeners in on their sound check at The Wiltern? Well, there goes your Monday afternoon.
Nerdist Wilco
And The Problem With That Problem
The problem with memoir is well-known. What’s less well-known is the problem with the problem with memoir.
Eating And/Or Reading
“The joy of reading about the meals of others shows that, in many ways, we are simple creatures: by merely looking upon someone else eating we can feel better fed.” In the New Yorker, Bee Wilson considers the “Pleasures of the Literary Meal,” something Seth Sawyers wrote about for the Millions last year.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Faulks, Drop Caps
New this week are A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks and the first six titles (A through F!) in Penguin’s snazzy new Penguin Drop Caps series.
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Not Quite a Review
“This is a tricky novel to review. I’m not even sure it is a novel. And I’m not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let’s-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer’s desk. What I can tell you is this: I was powerfully engaged and richly entertained by Sergio De La Pava’s Personae.” (Related: our own Garth Risk Hallberg wrote a profile of De La Pava.)
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Behind the National Book Awards
Our own Edan Lepucki interviewed National Book Award finalists George Saunders and Rachel Kushner for the National Book Foundation. Saunders discussed money issues in his writing. “Now I feel like paucity vs. grace is one of the great American issues—we all live with it every day.” Kushner explained her writing process. “The sentences are beads on a string; I see each one as essential.”
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Literary Resolutions
The new year is, of course, a time for resolutions, and Electric Literature has collected literary resolutions from Alexander Chee, Year in Reading alum Emily Gould, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and many more. Coming out of the hectic holiday season, Jonathan Lee‘s resolution seems particularly apt: “My literary new year’s resolution is to read slower. I want to try and re-discover the kind of reading where you savor every page instead of thinking about unread emails, progress through the book, progress through the to-be-read pile, and the quantity of remaining tea bags in cupboard.”