Now that NPR has begun fact checking his work, it’s come to light that David Sedaris is a liar. Or, he sort of embellishes. His work is ‘realish.’ So basically, he tells stories. On NPR. Which is feeling pretty sensitive abut the line between truth and truthiness after the Mike Daisey upset.
Truthiness and the Realish
Julie Powell at Powell’s
The Julie Powell interview at Powell's -- on butchery and infidelity and self-disclosure.
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Carpal Tunnel is the new Broken Back
Parts of Mac McLelland's Mother Jones piece, "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave," read like what Daniel Orozco might write had he worked in an major shipping warehouse instead of a human resources department.
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On Writing While Parenting
Having kids changes everything, of course, but for the writer, used to working in quiet solitude, it can feel like the end. Jessica Francis Kane writes about how she learned to write again, in a new way, after having children and offers some tips for new parents who write.
The Wives of Russian Masters
“Russia's most celebrated writers - including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam - are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.”
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An Unusual Inheritance
"They were still dressed for the funeral when their inheritance showed up." Granta magazine has a new short story by Amelia Gray, whose literary rise we considered back in 2012.
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Grand Officier Yaşar Bey
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He Just Keeps Going and Going and Going
As the publication date nears for Robert Caro's latest Lyndon Johnson installment, The Passage of Power, it's a good idea to brush up on your history of Caro's career. Enter Charles McGrath and his great portrait of one of the most prolific biographers of all time.
Autobiographical Revisionism
“‘It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.’ The autobiography of the imagination then is an autobiography of our base desires, the things we haven’t done but have longed for. It is our fantasies, our secrets from which we curate by redaction how someone else sees us. It is an autobiography of instinct, desire.” Emilia Phillips on poetry as the autobiography of the imagination, over at Ploughshares.
Sedaris is a humorist, working in a long, honored tradition. Did people think James Thurber or Mark Twain didn’t exaggerate? Exaggeration is the crux of humor. NPR, sigh.