First The Times-Picayune makes major cuts to its print output, and now The University of Missouri Press is shutting down after 54 years? This is not a great week for writing.
At Least Not in the Central Time Zone, That Is.
Writers and Their Day Jobs
Writing for Full Stop, Robert Fay asks, “If Mr. [T.S.] Eliot had to have a day job, why is it that writers and poets today are so cagey about what they do to pay the bills?” Previously, two of our staff writers have explored similar aspects of the same question. In 2009, Emily St. John Mandel wrote of the “constant struggle” that arises from “striking a balance between writing literary fiction and paying the rent.” And last year, Edan Lepucki looked at the perils of including “non-writing jobs” in one’s author bio.
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Breaking the Binary
Rachel Klein writes on raising a genderqueer, non-binary child. “Being a parent means, at some point, being able to look on as your child writes their own story, a story in which you play a role but which is ultimately not about you.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Capote; Mitchell; Maguire; Rendell; Schumacher; Dunn; Strayed
Out this week: The Early Stories of Truman Capote; Slade House by David Mitchell; After Alice by Gregory Maguire; Dark Corners by Ruth Rendell; The British Lion by Tony Schumacher; We Five by Mark Dunn; and a book of quotations by Cheryl Strayed. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
Twenty Years in the Wilderness
“I think that every novelist of the kind of novels that I write has in them maybe one really good book, but the trouble with so many novelists is that they keep on writing novels even when they run out of ideas.” Forrest Gump author Winston Groom on why it’s taken him 20 years to write his new novel. Pair with our recent three-way interview with writers Emily Barton, Alexander Chee, and Whitney Terrell, all of whom needed a decade for their most recent books.
Tabloid Fodder
“Sitting down to read The Actress, Amy Sohn’s newest novel, is even better than standing in line at the grocery store while the person in front of you disputes the price of a carton of orange juice, giving you extra time to read the tabloids. The Actress might be as licentious as a tabloid, but it is far more intelligently written. And, you probably won’t be reading it while standing in line inside a grocery store.”
Excuse this dust.
Have you been reading Michelle Dean’s Saturday History Lessons over at The Rumpus? This weekend she wrote on Dorothy Parker’s ashes, which are, apparently, in Baltimore. Also, this one, on Flannery O’Connor and her best pen pal Betty Hester, is great.
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Microscopic Tears
Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher uses powerful scanning electron microscopes to provide “an unexpected view of [a] familiar subject: … human tears.”