Hurry over to the Tournament of Books to see whether Open City or The Sisters Brothers was this year’s big winner!
The Verdict Is In!
Rebecca Hunt’s Mr. Chartwell
At The Washington Times, my review of Rebecca Hunt‘s Mr. Chartwell, a shaggy dog novel about Winston Churchill‘s “black dog” (depression).
Natasha Trethewey Reading
You can listen to U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey read her poem “Enlightenment” for the Virginia Festival of the Book.
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Urvashi Butalia on Indian Small Presses
Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali For Women, in 1984. In 2003, they parted ways to start their own projects: Menon began Women Unlimited; Butalia founded Zubaan Books. Now, in a compressed and edited interview for Mint, Butalia discusses some of the challenges she faces in India’s publishing ecosystem, and also notes, “in my 40 years in publishing, things have never felt as exciting as they are now. It truly seems there are infinite possibilities.”
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A Single Sentence
“Sometimes you come across sentences that are like cairns, evidence the trail continues, and you are so grateful to have found them.” For the Tin House blog Jacob Rubin considers one such sentence from Charles D’Ambrosio‘s Loitering, which our own Hannah Gersen reviewed for the Millions.
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Thank You, Scratch That
If you’ve ever been asked to write a thank-you note, you know that, paradoxically, it can be one of the hardest forms of writing to do well. In light of that, The Morning News has kindly republished their classic guide to writing thank-you notes, written by Leslie Harpold. Sample quote: “If you want to know when you get a genuine pass on writing a note, the litmus test is simple: Do I live under the same roof as the giver?”